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THE STORY OF 

ENGLISH SPEECH 

A Sketch of the Origin and Development of the 
English Language with Tables showing some of 
the more important Grammatical Forms of the 
Three Great Periods and Specimens of the 
Literature from Caedmon to Shakespeare, by 

CHARLES NOBLE 

Professor of the English Language and Rhetoric 
Grinnell College 

Author of "Studies in American Literature" 




BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 

The Copp Clark Co., limited, Toronto 



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Copyright, 191^ by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 



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$E? 11-1914 



The Oorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 

CI.A380281 



PREFACE 



THIS book is an attempt to put into a small 
volume the material wanted for my Freshman 
English work in the History of the Language. 
What has been done in this field so well by 
Lounsbury, Emerson, Bradley, Sweet and others, is appre- 
ciated, and there is no thought, particularly, of improving 
upon their work. What I wanted was something like 
their books, but briefer, combined with an outline of the 
more important forms of the West Saxon and the Middle 
English grammar, and a number of short selections which 
should show the development of the language, like Cor- 
son's handbook, but much less extended. I have tried 
also, to emphasize as well as I could, the close relation be- 
tween language development, literary conditions, and 
social and political movements. This is, to me, far the 
most interesting phase of the subject, and the one that is 
most likely to awaken a vital interest in the student and 
correlate the work in language with other studies. 

To acknowledge my indebtedness to other writers would 
be simply to name, in addition to those already referred 
to, every thing on the general subject upon which I have 
been able to lay hands. To Professor Ansley, of the State 
University of Iowa, Professor Robinson, of Harvard Uni- 
versity, and Dr. Craigie, of the "New English Diction- 
ary, " Oxford, I am indebted for kindly reading and criti- 
cising the manuscript at different stages of its growth. 
Probably, in spite of the care that has been taken, many 
mistakes will appear; and if any, outside of my classes, 
read the book I shall be very grateful for their criticisms. 



CONTENTS 

Part I. The Story 

I. English Among the World's Languages .... 9 
II. Period of Old English. General Historic 

Conditions 32 

III. Period of Old English. The Vocabulary. . . 43 

IV. Period of Old English. Alphabet and Sound 

Changes 53 

V. Period of Old English. Grammar 65 

VI. Period of Middle English. General Historic 

Conditions 89 

VII. Period of Middle English. The Vocabulary 100 
VIII. Period of Middle English. Pronunciation 

and Grammar 108 

IX. Period of Modern English. General Historic 

Conditions 117 

X. Period of Modern English. The Vocabulary 131 
XI. Period of Modern English. Pronunciation 

and Spelling 141 

XII. Period of Modern English. Grammar 159 

Historical Chart of Political, Social, Literary 

and Linguistic Progress 178 

Part II. Grammatical Forms 

I. Four Old English Declensions 

The Declension 184 

The A Declension 186 

The Weak, or N Declension 186 

The Umlaut Declension 187 



CONTENTS 

II. The Personal Pronoun 188 

III. Demonstrative and Interrogative Pronouns. . 192 

IV. The Adjective 194 

V. The Verb . . 195 

1. Tabular View of the Ablaut Series of 

Verbs 195 

2. Conjugation of the Strong Verb. ... 196 

3. Tabular View of the Reduplicating 

Verb 198 

.4. Tabular View of the Weak Verb. . . 199 

Part III. Specimens of Old and Middle English 

I. Widsith 201 

II. Caedmon's Hymnus. 202 

III. The Lord's Prayer, at four periods 203 

IV. Translations of a passage in the "De Con- 

solatione Philosophiae " of Boethius 

(1) Translation by Alfred the Great 205 

(2) Translation by Chaucer 206 

(3) Translation by Queen Elizabeth 207 

V. The Ormulum 208 

VI. Layamon's "Brut" 210 

VII. Proclamation of Henry the Third 212 

VIII. Ancren Riwle 213 

IX. Ayenbite of Inwit 215 

X. The Owl and the Nightingale 215 

Glossary 218 

Index 249 



Part I 



THE STORY 



THE 
STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

CHAPTER I 

English Among the World's Languages. 

LANGUAGE is the expression of life, whether 
for the individual, the nation or the race; and 
the constant aim of this study of the subject 
will be to show this living relation of language 
to the life of nations and of peoples. It is, indeed, implied 
in the somewhat poetical terms and phrases used by 
philologists to describe the interrelations of the various 
forms of speech; so that they speak of "families" of lan- 
guages, "sister "tongues and dialects, the "mother" tongue 
and so on, making quite the impression of a family party. 
Languages are said to grow, to develop, to decay, to die; 
to have certain tendencies and characteristics; to show 
signs of a spirit of one sort or another; the life idea thus 
pervading the usual treatment of the subject. 

The special purpose of this introductory chapter is to 
show the relation of the English language to the other 
families, branches and divisions, limiting our study to 
those which have had some vital and significant relation 
to its origin and growth. In the Lecture on "Christianity 

9 



10 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and Letters," in Newman's volume, "The Idea of a 
University," is an eloquent and suggestive passage in 
which he shows how that which we call civilization is 
really the life developed and handed on to later genera- 
tions by the nations which surround the Mediterranean 
Sea. Here are his words: "Looking then, at the countries 
which surround the Mediterranean Sea, as a whole, I see 
them to be, from time immemorial, the seat of an associa- 
tion of intellect and mind, such as to deserve to be called 
the ' Intellect and mind of the Human Kind.' Starting 
as it does and advancing from certain centers, till their 
respective influences intersect and conflict and then at 
length intermingle and combine, a common thought has 
been generated and a common civilization defined and 
established. Egypt is one such starting point, Syria 
another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and North Africa 
a fifth, — afterwards France and Spain." On this view 
of the origin of our civilization Newman bases his argu- 
ment for the supreme importance of the classical litera- 
tures of Greece and Rome in any scheme of cultural edu- 
cation; and from this view we shall start in our approach 
to the study of the Story of English Speech. It is the 
group of languages which had their historic home on the 
shores of the great inland sea of Europe, Asia and Africa, 
that have had the most to do with the making and shaping 
of English, and to this group of languages we will first turn 
our attention. Two of the families of this group take 
their names from the book of Genesis. In the Tenth 
Chapter of that Book we read of the three sons of Noah: 
Shem, Ham and Japheth, as the ancestors of three great 
divisions of the human race, which accordingly have re- 
ceived from them the names Semitic, Hamitic and Japhe- 
tic; and these names were at one time accepted by Philol- 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 11 

ogists as convenient terms under which to group the 
various forms of speech, very much as the Linnaean classi- 
fication of plants was used by the earlier Botanists. As 
the study of language progressed, however, it was found 
that this classification would not satisfy the demands of 
all the facts. In a general way the languages of Africa 
had been grouped under the term Hamitic, those of Asia 
under the term Semitic, and those of Europe under the 
term Japhetic, a classification which served well enough 
until it was made clear that many of the languages of 
Africa were of an entirely different structure from the 
Egyptian, and that some of the languages of Asia were 
much more closely related to those of Europe than to the 
other Asiatic tongues with which they had been associated. 
So the name "Japhetic" has been abandoned and the other 
two greatly restricted in their use. 

The Hamitic family of languages is of comparatively 
slight importance for direct influence upon English, but 
as represented by the speech of the Egyptians it cannot 
be overlooked entirely. Coptic, formerly spoken by the 
peasantry of the country, has had no important historical 
contact with English; but, as in recent years these people 
have been under the government of England, and as suc- 
cessful evangelistic and educational work has been carried 
on among them by English and American missionaries, 
there has been more or less study of Coptic by English 
scholars. Already a very few words derived from Coptic 
might be found in English dictionaries, but this is likely 
to be the limit of the influence of this language upon Eng- 
lish. Ancient Egyptian exists in inscriptions on monu- 
ments and tombs and on the walls of ruined temples, and 
in the "papyri" or writings on papyrus, the most ancient 
known form of paper, from which the word is derived, 



12 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

many of which have been found in the mummy cases or 
the wrappings of the embalmed bodies of the ancient 
Egyptians. There is one important literary monument 
of this language in existence, known as "The Book of the 
Dead," extracts from which, in translation in some of the 
collections of specimens of the literature of the world, 
may be found in most large libraries. Ancient Egyptian 
can not have much direct influence upon English, as it is 
known only to a limited number of advanced students ; 
but as the speech of a mighty civilization which antedated 
and strongly moved the life and literature of the Hebrews, 
the Greeks and the Romans, it has through them made a 
deep impression on modern life. Especially through the 
Old Testament Scriptures, religious and moral ideas, with 
the words which express them, have through the process 
of translation and retranslation made their way into 
English. 

The group of languages called Semitic is made up of 
those spoken by the peoples living in thos? Asiatic coun- 
tries bordering on the Mediterranean, and in the great 
central plain watered by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. 
The Assyrians, Chaldeans, Phenicians, Hebrews and 
Arabs are among the most important of these; and those 
among them who have most strongly influenced English 
are the Hebrews and the Arabs. Hebrew is the language 
of* the Old Testament Scriptures, and has thus played a 
large part in the thought and language of all those peo- 
ple who, like our own, regard the Old Testament as a part 
of their Bible or sacred book. Indirectly, through the 
New Testament Greek and through the general influence 
of Hebrew thought in matters of Art, philosophy, poli- 
tics, and especially religion and morals, Hebrew has made 
itself felt in manifold ways upon modern thought and so 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 13 

upon modern language. For example, the familiar words, 
Jehovah, Messiah, Sabbath, Christian, Amen, Hallelujah, 
with many others, come either directly or through Greek, 
from Hebrew into English. Arabic is the speech of that 
wonderful people who in the seventh and eighth centuries 
carried the religion of Mohammed and the civilization 
which accompanied it from their home in the deserts of 
Arabia through western Asia and Northern Africa and 
into southern Europe. These Arabs had the most alert 
minds of the middle ages, and they became in many 
things the teachers of Europe, their influence in matters 
of art and science reaching far beyond the boundaries 
of their conquests. In these lines of thought traces 
of their activity maybe found in the vocabularies of every 
modern European language. Such words as "algebra," 
"alcohol," "alchemy," in which the prefix "al" betrays 
the Arabic origin, are illustrations of this fact. 

The third group oflanguages, which by the geographical 
location of those who speak them and by the movements 
and conflicts of history have been brought into such rela- 
tions with English as to call for mention here, is that known 
to philologists as the "Ural-Altaic," a name taking its 
origin from the fact that the earliest known historical 
home of its most important members was somewhere in 
the region of the Ural and the Altai mountains, in eastern 
Europe or western Asia. The members of this family 
have wandered far from these mountains, but still may be 
associated as living in those parts of the two continents. 
The Hungarians, one branch of this family, now form one 
of the twx> great divisions of the " Austro-Hungarian " 
Empire; and through their modern literature, their politi- 
cal relations with the modern world, and especially the 
large emigration from their land to America, are making 



14 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

themselves felt in modern English speech. The influence 
of the Finns, another branch of the Ural-Altaic family, 
must be mainly limited to what may result from their 
recent considerable emigration to the northwestern sec- 
tions of America. The third, and historically the best 
known branch of this family, is the Turkish. Widely sepa- 
rated from their linguistic kindred, in customs and religion, 
and yet more widely diverse in these respects from Eng- 
lish speaking people, the Turks have yet, through the 
mighty part they have played in History, and the part 
they still play in European politics, made a strong mark 
upon English speech. Recent tendencies in emigration, 
in this case also, seem likely to bring this element to a 
place of larger importance. 

While the direct influence of these three families of 
language upon English has been small as compared with 
that of those more closely related, it has not been insignif- 
icant; and, indeed, we have probably a good deal to learn 
yet as to the earlier relationship of these tongues with each 
other and with the great Indo-European family, to which 
English belongs and which is now to be considered. 

The name Indo-European is here given to the group of 
languages spoken by the Aryan peoples. Some philolo- 
gists prefer to use the word "Aryan" for this group of 
tongues, and some use the word " Indo-Germanic. " There 
is something to be said, of course, for each of these terms; 
but as "Aryan" is often used as a race term rather than 
as a linguistic, and as "Germanic" is generally used in a 
much more limited sense, "Indo-European" seems for 
the present purpose, the better term. It points out at 
once the important fact that the representatives of this 
family are found both in Asia and in Europe; that in this 
case, linguistic connection is not, as in the Hamitic and 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 15 

the Semitic families associated with Geographical neigh- 
borhood. The Aryans have been great travellers, have in 
fact been the great explorers and colonizers of the world, 
so that peoples speaking the Indo-European tongues are 
now found everywhere. If on a map of the world a curv- 
ing line should be drawn from southern India in a north- 
westerly direction, through Persia, Asia Minor and Europe, 
that line would pass through the historic homes of most 
of the members of this family of languages; while to follow 
its more recent advances the line would have to cross the 
Atlantic Ocean, encircle the continents of North and South 
America, pass over the Pacific Ocean to the Hawaiian 
Islands, Australia and the Philippines, and return by South 
Africa, even then omitting many important centers where 
this group of kindred tongues is making itself at home. 

The branches of the Indo-European family may be ar- 
ranged in nine divisions: Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hel- 
lenic, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and Teutonic, 
considering them in a geographical order which loosely 
corresponds to the order of their historical development. 

The Indian branch includes the languages of India and 
Ceylon. It may, at first thought, seem strange that races 
and languages so different as the English and the Hindu 
should be classified as in any sense belonging together; 
but as a matter of fact, both as to people and language, 
the differences are superficial, the resemblances funda- 
mental. If one will look carefully at the portrait of an 
Indian gentleman he can scarcely fail to observe that 
under the dark skin, the features are in form and outline 
very much like those of an English or American man of the 
same class. So those who have made a thorough study of 
the languages of India have observed that under the sur- 
face differences of word forms and idioms there is a close 



16 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

likeness, amounting sometimes to identity, of word roots 
and of the fundamental principles of grammar. Histori- 
cally the Indian languages have touched the other Indo- 
European tongues, and among them, English, at three 
points. The Vedic scriptures, hymns and sacred writings 
of Brahmanism, dating from about the year 1500 B. C, 
and representing the oldest known form of the language, 
have been of deep interest to students of Philosophy and 
of Comparative Religion. The Sanscrit and Pali, of about 
500 B. C, containing the Buddhist sacred writings, have 
had a similar religious and philosophical interest for Euro- 
pean scholars; and, in addition, Sanscrit is recognized as 
of especial importance for Philology, because it has a 
thoroughly developed grammar, the study of which is of 
great assistance in the comparative investigation of the 
Indo-European languages. For this reason Sanscrit is 
taught in our Universities and is studied by those who 
desire to make themselves specialists in language. The 
vernacular dialects of modern India, derived from Prakrit, 
a modified form of Sanscrit, come into touch with English 
in these days through business, the political and educa- 
tional activities of the British government in India, and 
the educational and religious work of British and iVmerican 
missionaries. 

The second branch of the Indo-European family is here 
called "Iranian," a term taken from the word "Iran," a 
native official name for the kingdom of Persia; though the 
branch includes the languages of other peoples than those 
who can be strictly spoken of Under the term "Iran." 
Old Persian, the most ancient known form of this branch, 
is found in inscriptions on ancient monuments. "Zend," 
the language of the "Zend-Avesta," the sacred book which 
contains the writings of Zoroaster, the great religious 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 17 

teacher of the ancient Persians, has an interest for modern 
scholars like that of the Vedic and Sanscrit writings of 
India; and Modern Persian has a literature which has been 
widely circulated in translation among English speaking 
people, a very familiar illustration being the "Rubaiyat" 
of Omar Khayyam, the translation of which by Edward 
Fitzgerald has become a classic of English poetry. Com- 
mercial intercourse also has brought a number of Persian 
words into English; such, for example, as " bazaar, " "car- 
avan," "shawl." 

As we pass from Persia into Asia Minor, we come to 
the Armenian people, whose language we may call the 
third branch of the Indo-European family. These people 
are now found in all parts of the Turkish Empire, and are 
widely scattered from their original home which was prob- 
ably about the region of Mount Ararat, but they have 
preserved everywhere their national religion, customs and 
language. There is an interesting version of the Bible, 
called the "Gregorian," in the ancient form of this lan- 
guage. The Armenians are of especial interest to Ameri- 
cans, and their speech has come into particularly close 
touch with English, through the fact that American mis- 
sionaries in the Turkish Empire have had a comparatively 
large success among them, and because there has in recent 
years been a considerable immigration of this people to the 
United States. 

The "Hellenic, " the fourth branch of the Indo-European 
family, would be more readily recognized by most English 
readers if called Greek; but "Hellenic" is a better word for 
our purpose because it is a race name and applies to all 
the widely scattered branches of the people, whether in 
Asia-Minor, in the Islands of the Aegean Sea, or in Sicily 
and Southern Italy, as well as in Greece itself. There are 



18 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

a number of dialects of the Hellenic speech; but the classi- 
cal Ionic-Attic has had the greatest influence upon modern 
European languages. It is through its great literature 
that this language has made itself most strongly felt upon 
English. The Hellenic philosophers have been the teach- 
ers of all subsequent times, the principles they laid down 
guiding all later scientific and philosophical inquiry. So 
the Hellenic literature was the chief inspiring influence of 
the thought movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies, often spoken of as the "renaissance" or the new 
birth of mankind; and since that time, in every period it 
has profoundly moved all studious and thoughtful minds 
who have come under its influence. The Hebrew scrip- 
tures, or the Old Testament, translated into Greek in the 
version called the Septuagint, constituted the "Bible" 
used 'by the Apostles and by the early Christians in general; 
and the writings of the New Testament and of the Apos- 
tolic fathers were all in this language. It would therefore 
scarcely be possible to exaggerate the influence which the 
Hellenic speech has exerted upon English thought; and 
the language is thus of especial interest as the vehicle 
through which so much that is fundamental has come into 
the life of English speaking people. Such a thought in- 
fluence necessarily makes its mark upon the language, and 
Greek is found very plainly in the vocabulary and the 
grammar of English. Directly through the channels of 
scientific, philosophical and religious literature, and in- 
directly through Latin, and in less degree through other 
languages, many words have come from Greek into Eng- 
lish, and many modifications of old Teutonic grammatical 
forms have been brought about through the study of the 
Greek classics. It is safe to say that a good knowledge of 
Greek is essential to anything like a scholarly acquaintance 
with English. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 19 

The fifth branch of the Indo-European family, the Al- 
banian, is the language spoken by a comparatively small 
number of people, living near the eastern coast of the Adri- 
atic Sea, until recently a part of the Turkish Empire, but 
now erected into an autonomous state, as one of the 
results of the Balkan war. It is not important for any 
special influence upon English, but is mentioned here for 
the sake of completeness as a link between those previously 
named and the next, the "Italic." 

This, the sixth branch of the Indo-European family, is 
of the greatest interest and importance for its close relation 
to all the languages of southern Europe and to English at 
every stage of its development. Its various forms may 
be classified in two main divisions: first the speech of the 
ancient inhabitants of Italy, existing only in monumental 
inscriptions and such other forms as make it a subject for 
the study of the archaeologist, and called the "Umbrian- 
Samnitic;" and second, the language of the people who 
long ruled the civilized world and taught mankind the 
arts of conquest and government, the Latin. Latin litera- 
ture is, confessedly, not so great in original philosophical 
and poetic thought as Greek, and is, indeed, largely an 
imitation and reflection of the older language; but some 
of its greater writers, notably Vergil and Cicero, were 
familiar to European scholars throughout the Middle Ages, 
when Greek was comparatively unknown. The ideas' of 
the great Hellenes reached our ancestors of that period 
largely through the medium of Latin. As Rome was the 
conqueror and long the ruler of the world, in Latin were 
recorded the laws and the principles of government which 
have since largely guided and shaped political action. All 
the important words of the sentence just written are of 
Latin derivation; and whenever one tries to write in Eng- 



20 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

lish about political matters he will find that whether he 
wishes it or is conscious of it or not, he is using Latin ideas 
and expressing them in words of Latin origin. At a very- 
early period in the history of the Christian church the 
Bible was translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin; 
and as the Bishop of Rome came to be recognized as Pope, 
or chief Bishop, this Latin Bible in its authorized form, 
known as the Vulgate, came to be recognized as "The 
Bible" in the minds of the people of Western Europe. 
Thus from the time of St. Jerome, about 380 A. D., till 
the time of Martin Luther, or for eleven hundred years, 
the Bible of all Europe, except Greece and Russia, was 
Latin. The Church services, prayers and hymns, were 
mainly in that language; and as Europe came out of the 
darkn'ess of the early middle ages and universities began 
to be founded, all education came to be in Latin. It 
became a universal language in which educated men, 
whether English, French, German, Italian or Spanish, 
communicated with each other. These are some of the 
reasons why Latin has had such a mighty influence upon 
English and upon all modern European speech; an influence 
not so fundamental, perhaps, as that of Greek, but far 
more pervasive and more easily perceived in the words 
and grammatical forms. Side by side with the literary 
Latin which has been preserved for us in the classical 
writings, and which has ceased to be a living, growing form 
of speech, was a popular or vulgar Latin, spoken on the 
streets, in the shops, and on the farms, which has never 
ceased to live. Mingled with Teutonic elements from the 
speech of the Goths and Vandals who swept over Italy 
and Spain and destroyed the Roman Empire, and with 
Celtic elements from the speech of the native inhabitants 
of France, Spain and Switzerland, this vulgar Latin is 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 21 

preserved to modern times in what are known as the 
Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and 
French. These are all fundamentally Latin forms of 
speech, though they all have large infusions of other ele- 
ments. 

Closely connected with English at every period of its 
history is the group of languages spoken by the ancient 
inhabitants of Gaul, Britain and Ireland, the seventh 
branch of the Indo-European family, the Celtic. The 
Celtic people seem in their migrations to have moved 
westward just in advance of the Teutons and the Latins, 
and the small remnant of them are now found clinging to 
the rocky shores of Wales, Ireland and Western Scotland. 
There are several important divisions of the Celtic Branch, 
which should be distinguished: They are the Gallic, the 
Britannic and the Gaelic. Gallic is the language of ancient 
Gaul, a country nearly corresponding in geographical 
extent to modern France, and is a lost language which has 
left traces of itself in coins and inscriptions and in Latin 
writings of the period of the Roman conquest of Gaul. 
Britannic has as its most important modern representa- 
tive, Cymric or Welsh, a living language spoken by the 
people of Wales, and having a literature of its own. The 
Cornish division of Britannic was spoken by the ancient 
inhabitants of the County of Cornwall, they with the 
Welsh being the representatives in modern Britain, of the 
ancient British, who were conquered by the English in 
the Fifth and Sixth centuries. Such names as Trevelyan, 
Polhemus and Pendennis indicate Cornish origin, accord- 
ing to the old rhyme : 

"By tre, pol, and pen 
Ye shall know the Cornish men." 



M THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Another fragment of Britannic is found in the Armorican, 
or Breton, spoken in North-western France. Gaelic has 
three important subdivisions; Irish, or Erse, still spoken 
and having, like Welsh, a literature of its own; Manx, the 
native speech of the Isle of Man; and Scottish-Gaelic, the 
language of the Highlands and the Western Islands of 
Scotland. The Britannic and Gaelic forms of Celtic have 
been historically in very close relations with English. 
Their literature has been incorporated into the very body 
of English literature; for example, the legends of King 
Arthur originated in Gaelic; and some words have been 
carried over from Celtic into English. Undoubtedly there 
has been more or less blending of the Celtic spirit with that 
of the Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes and Normans, who 
with others make up that strange composite, the modern 
Englishman or American; and it may be true as believed 
by some thoughtful students of English Literature, that 
the real English genius is found in its highest form, where 
there is a strong mixture of Celtic blood; or as it has been 
put in a more extreme form, that the great Englishmen 
are mostly Irish when they are not Scotch. It should not 
be forgotten, also, that there was a time when Ireland was 
far in advance of Great Britain in civilization. Ireland 
was Christian when England was still Pagan, and Irish 
missionaries brought Christianity into Britain before the 
missionaries from Rome landed in Kent, and this early 
Gaelic Christianity shared with the Church of Rome the 
work of converting the English. It is really a matter of 
surprise, considering all these facts, that we find so little 
evidence as we do of the effect of Celtic speech upon Eng- 
lish. There is, indeed, reason to believe in a language 
antipathy, which has kept the two from blending, in spite 
of their close contact, very much as the racial antipathy 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 23 

has kept Ireland politically and socially apart from Eng- 
land in spite of their long and close formal union. 

Turning backward to eastern and north-eastern Europe 
the student will find the home of the eighth Branch of the 
Indo-European Family, the Balto-Slavic, the two elements 
of whose name suggest the two great Divisions of the 
Branch. The "Baltic" languages are those spoken by 
the peoples who anciently lived on or near the shores of 
the Baltic Sea. "Ancient Prussian," the language of the 
Slavic inhabitants of Old Prussia, or " Preussen, " the prov- 
ince which when conquered by the Great Elector of 
Brandenburg gave its name to the new Kingdom he estab- 
lished, "Lithuanian" and "Lettic" are the subdivisions 
of this "Baltic" group recognized in works on Compara- 
tive Philology. Much more important historically, and 
as represented in modern speech, is the other, the Slavonic 
Division of the Balto-Slavic Branch. This includes the 
speech of the millions of Russians ; of Bulgaria, now taking 
its place as one of the "Powers;" of Bohemia, an important 
part of the Austrian Empire; of the Poles, once a powerful 
nation of Europe, but now dismembered and subjects of 
Germany, Austria and Russia; and of a number of other 
nations and tribes. Thus it is easily seen that the Slavonic 
tongues constitute a widely extended and very important 
group of languages. They have not as yet been in very 
close touch with English. But Russian and Polish litera- 
ture are being more and more widely read by English speak- 
ing people; great numbers of Slavonic people are among 
the recent immigrants to the United States; and these 
facts, with the commercial and political intercourse which 
is constantly increasing, are sure to make an impression 
worth noting upon the English Language. 

The ninth Branch of the Indo-European Family, and 



24 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

that to which English belongs, is the " Teutonic, " that 
group of languages which includes those spoken by the 
Teutonic or Germanic peoples. The first of these terms 
resembles the names which some of these peoples have 
given to themselves, as "Teutsch," "Deutsch," "Dutch;" 
while the other is the Latin name, of uncertain origin but 
used by the Romans. The Teutonic peoples have occupied 
northern and north-western Europe from the earliest his- 
toric times. Their languages fall into three clearly dis- 
tinguished Divisions : Norse, or Scandinavian, which might 
also be called North Teutonic or Germanic; Gothic, which 
might similarly be called East Teutonic or Germanic; and 
what the philologists have agreed to call West Germanic, 
which might as well be called West Teutonic. To avoid 
confusion, however, we will hold to the most generally re- 
ceived terminology: Teutonic for the Branch; Scandina- 
vian, Gothic and West Germanic for the Divisions. 

Of the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic is the most 
ancient and for the purposes of comparative study the 
most important. Iceland was an ancient colony from Nor- 
way, and by the remoteness and isolation of their home, 
the Icelanders were kept from much intercourse with other 
nations; so with them the ancient form of Norse speech 
has been preserved in comparative purity. In Icelandic 
also are found some of the most ancient examples of 
Norse Literature, in the Edda which contains the Norse 
form of the early Teutonic Legends. The Norwegian form 
of Norse came into close touch with English in the early 
history of the language, as the two peoples were neighbors, 
though not so closely as the Danes and English, before the 
migration of the English to Britain, and afterwards were 
frequently at war or fighting in alliance against other na- 
tions. The Normans, too, it must be remembered, were 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 25 

originally Norsemen; and though they adopted the lan- 
guage of the French whom they conquered, as they after- 
wards adopted the language of the English when they con- 
quered them, yet Norse words and forms remained in their 
speech and came into English with the Norman element 
which they introduced. Of all the Scandinavian lan- 
guages none have had so much influence upon English as 
the speech of the Danes. When Tennyson wrote an ode 
of welcome to the Danish Princess Alexandra on her mar- 
riage with the Prince of Wales, he said: 

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we, 
But all of us Danes in our welcome of Thee, Alex- 
andra." 

Interpreted as plain prose this might somewhat exaggerate 
the proportion of the Danish element in English life; but 
when we remember that at one time a Danish King ruled 
all England, and that for many years the greater part of 
the country was under Danish government, we shall not 
be surprised to find a large number of words and forms of 
Danish origin in the English language. The Swedish 
tongue has not had much to do with English; but with the 
mingling of Swedish life with that of the United States in 
recent years through immigration, the language is likely 
to be affected to some extent. 

Of the Gothic Division of the Teutonic Branch com- 
paratively little is known. Only slight traces of the East 
Gothic have been found, in the language spoken by the 
inhabitants of the Crimea; but West Gothic, the form of 
the language spoken by the conquerors of Rome, has left 
a deep impression upon the Romance languages, all of which 
belong to peoples who formed parts of the Roman Empire ; 



26 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and though not the direct ancestor of English, Gothic is 
very important for its study, as being closely related to 
the primitive language called West Germanic, from which 
English must have been derived. It is preserved for our 
study in one very interesting monument. In the fourth 
century A. D., a Bishop of the Christian church, named 
Ulfilas, a missionary among the Goths, prepared for his 
converts a translation of the Scriptures including the New 
Testament and selected parts of the Old. One of the most 
ancient manuscripts of the Bible in existence is a copy of 
this version now preserved in the library of the University 
of Upsala in Sweden ; and more or less complete editions of 
this version may be found in most large libraries. As has 
been already suggested, a knowledge of Gothic is essential 
for the thorough study of English because of its close rela- 
tion to the ancient form of Germanic from which our 
language is most directly descended. Unfortunately there 
is no corresponding source for the study of that ancient 
form. Using the figure of speech implied by the use of the 
word family with reference to language, we may call 
Gothic a sort of Great Aunt of English; and as we are not 
able to learn much about our linguistic Grandmother, we 
are the more interested in what we can discover about her 
venerable sister. 

Philologists have given the name "West Germanic" to 
this supposed ancestor of English and sister of Gothic ; and 
from West Germanic it is believed, have descended the 
two groups of closely related languages known as "High 
German" and "Low German," the terms "High" and 
"Low" as here used referring to the parts of Europe oc- 
cupied by the tribes who in earlier times spoke these lan- 
guages. High German is the language of the Germanic 
people who lived in the higher more mountainous parts of 



\ 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 27 

northern and central Europe; while Low German is the 
name applied to the languages of those who occupied the 
lower regions along the coasts of the North Sea and the 
Baltic. This description would be misleading if applied 
to present day conditions; for the early inhabitants of 
many of these coast countries have emigrated to other 
parts of the world or have dwindled in number, and their 
places have been taken, as in the great cities of the north 
German coast, by people speaking High German, or in 
other cases, by people using Scandinavian or Slavonic 
forms of speech. The present condition may be approx- 
imately stated by saying that High German corresponds 
to what we commonly call German, and Low German to 
all the other divisions of the Germanic as distinguished 
from the Gothic and the Scandinavian; as for example, 
Dutch, Flemish and English. 

Historically High German is found in three forms cor- 
responding to three chronological periods: Old High Ger- 
man, Middle High German, and Modern High German, 
the last being the language we are all more or less familiar 
with through its Literature or through our business or 
social intercourse with those who speak or write it. There 
is a prevalent impression among those not well informed 
on the subject that German is in some sort an ancestor of 
English; but it is an entirely mistaken impression. The 
languages are cousins, derived from the same ancestor, 
West Germanic, and developing independently, each ac- 
cording to its own conditions and laws. Of course it is 
true that through Literature and through commercial, 
political and educational intercourse, the twx> languages 
have been closely associated and have more or less in- 
fluenced each other; and it is also true that in this process 
English has been more affected by German than German 



28 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

by English, for the reason that English has a peculiar 
facility in taking up and incorporating with itself words 
and forms from other languages. Indeed this is one of the 
main differences between the two forms of speech. Ger- 
man has largely grown from its own roots, according to its 
own laws, with comparatively little sign of influence from 
other languages; while English borrows extensively from 
other tongues, both in words and in grammatical struct- 
ure. So it happens that the farther back you go in the 
history of the two languages the closer resemblances do 
you find between them. In a modern English book one 
would probably notice, on a superficial examination, more 
words that look like French than words that look like 
German; but in an Old English book he would find scarcely 
any that looked like French, while he would be constantly 
struck by the close resemblance of words and forms to 
German. In spite of this fact it would be entirely mis- 
leading to speak of English as descended from German or 
of German as descended from English. They are linguistic 
cousins, springing from a common ancestor, growing 
each according to its own laws, and changed, each by its 
peculiar historical conditions, until now, to a superficial 
observer, English might well seem more like French, 
a comparatively remote relative, than like its own first 
cousin, so to speak, German. 

Of the Low German division of the West Germanic 
there are four important subdivisions: Saxon, Frisian, 
Franconian, English. The word "Saxon" is here used 
for the original form of the speech which is now sometimes 
called low German or Piatt Deutsch, which must not be 
thought of as a debased form of High German, as such 
popular usage would seem to imply, but is a distinct and 
important division of "Low German." Frisian is the 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 29 

one of these divisions which most closely resembles Eng- 
lish. It is still spoken in Friesland and in some of the 
islands off the northern coast of Germany and Holland. 
Of Franconian the most important modern representa- 
tives are Flemish, the popular language of Belgium, 
(French being the speech of the Court and of Society in 
that country), and Dutch, the language of Holland. Of 
these two, Dutch has been the more closely related to 
English, through the important part which the Hollanders 
played in European history in the Sixteenth and Seven- 
teenth centuries, and especially to American English, 
through their share in the colonization and early history 
of the United States, and the large number of Dutch immi- 
grants as well as descendants of the original Dutch settlers 
in all parts of that country. It is a vulgar error very com- 
mon in some parts of America to call German " Dutch. " 
It may have arisen from the fact that "Deutsch" is the 
word the Germans themselves use as their national and 
linguistic name; but those who care to use language cor- 
rectly will not allow themselves to forget that "German" 
is the English word for the speech and the nationality of 
the Germans, while " Dutch" is the English word for the 
people and the language of Holland. 



30 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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CHAPTER II 

Period of Old English. 700-1100. General Historic 

Conditions. 

IT is a remark of the historian Freeman that there 
are to be recognized in history three Englands; that 
is three homes of the English language and of Eng- 
lish life : namely, the region on and near the northern 
coast of Germany, the oldest known home of the Angles, 
Jutes and Saxons; the island of Great Britain, or that part 
of it which we are accustomed to call England; and finally 
English speaking North America, including the United 
States and Canada. Following this suggestion of the 
English historian, we consider first that oldest England on 
the continent of Europe, occupied by English speaking 
people long before they had any connection with the island 
of Great Britain. If you will notice on the map the point 
where the peninsula of Denmark springs northward from 
the coast line of the Baltic Sea, you will see a part of this 
oldest England. It is impossible to give with certainty 
the boundaries of this ancient home of our race and lan- 
guage; but we may be reasonably sure that the Elbe and 
the Weser rivers and the shores of the Baltic and the 
North Seas were familiar to the oldest English. There 
were three quite distinctly separated tribes of these Old 
English folk: namely, the Jutes, the Saxons, from whom 
we get the second element in the name, "Anglo-Saxon," 
with all the place names ending in "sex," such as Essex, 

32 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 33 

Sussex, Wessex; and the Angles from whose name comes 
the first element in Anglo-Saxon, the adjective Anglian, 
and by a sound change which we notice in a number of 
other examples, the words England and English. We do 
not know a great deal about these oldest English; but 
enough appears from the earliest historical records to justi- 
fy us in saying that they were a people closely resembling 
their Scandinavian cousins in Denmark, Norway and 
Sweden. Like them they were lovers of the ocean and 
spent much of their time sailing over the North and the 
Baltic Seas; and sometimes they went as far. as to the 
islands of Britain. In that part of Europe, which had not 
yet yielded to the influence of Christianity, and had never 
felt much the power of Roman civilization, those first 
centuries of the Christian era were very rude and fierce 
times. It would not be correct to speak of these earliest 
English as savages, for savages do not build and navigate 
sea-going ships; but it cannot be denied that they were a 
rude, fierce, piratical people. The object of their voyages 
was not commerce so much as pillage; they would attack 
unprotected places on the sea coast, and carry home the 
booty; their social organization was military, and some of 
the names given to their chief "Eorl," such as "Gold- 
Giver," or "Ring-Distributor," imply that one of his 
functions was to see that the booty from their expeditions 
was fairly divided. But they had the virtues as well as 
the vices of their race and time. They were brave, gener- 
ous, enterprising, serious, earnest; were not afraid of death, 
and would give as freely as they would take. They gave 
woman a higher place, honored their wives and mothers 
more, and were in general purer and more wholesome in 
their lives than the more highly civilized people of southern 
Europe. So much at least may be learned from the com- 



34 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

ments of Latin writers upon the Germanic people in gen- 
eral, and from the study of their epic poem, "Beowulf." 
They had some knowledge and skill in music, and some 
rude poetry. Whether this was written down, or simply 
kept in memory and repeated from one "Scop " or minstrel 
to another, we do not certainly know; but the "runic" 
letters are probably at least as old as the period of which 
we are thinking. There are a few poetical compositions, 
besides the epic already referred to, and existing in a later 
form of Old English, which by their references to names 
and customs, give evidence that they originated in this 
time when the Angles, Jutes and Saxons lived in the oldest 
England. As these exist, however, only in the form of 
re-written copies in the West Saxon dialect of the time of 
Alfred, they do not tell us much as to the language of the 
earlier period. The study of the dialects of English, as 
they are found in documents of various sorts of earlier date 
than any of these examples of West Saxon literature, and 
the comparative study of the remains we have of the kin- 
dred low German languages and of Gothic, make it evident 
that the language then spoken could not have been essen- 
tially different from that which we find written down in 
the earliest examples of English as it was spoken in Great 
Britain. 

The islands of Great Britain and Ireland were, in these 
early centuries, inhabited by Celtic tribes, who, of course, 
spoke the Britannic and Gaelic forms of the Celtic Branch 
of languages. What little we know about these early 
British people comes to us mostly through the Roman 
historians; for Britain was visited by Julius Caesar about 
55 B. C, and was conquered and made a part of the Roman 
Empire by Claudius about a century later; the Romans 
holding and governing the country for about four hundred 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 35 

years. The early British were like the Angles, Jutes and 
Saxons in that they often fought and quarreled fiercely 
among themselves, but seem not to have had so much 
self-reliance and enterprise. They had, to some extent, 
embraced Christianity, and had been weakened rather 
than strengthened by their contact with the civilization 
of Rome. Hostile tribes from Ireland and Scotland often 
invaded southern Britain; and one of the most remarkable 
and interesting relics of the Roman occupation is found in 
the remains of the great wall which was built clear across 
the country from sea to sea, to aid in resisting these in- 
vasions. Perhaps the habit of depending upon the Ro- 
mans made the British less able to protect themselves; 
but at any rate it was not long after the withdrawal of 
Rome from Britain in 411 A. D., till the British were 
negotiating with the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, with prom- 
ises of gifts of lands, cattle and money, to come and help 
them fight the Picts and Scots, their fierce enemies from 
Scotland and Ireland. Our English ancestors were not 
slow to accept these offers; had not much trouble in de- 
feating the Picts and Scots ; liked the country so well that 
they stayed and invited their neighbors and kindred frorn 
the oldest England to join them, and if the British ob- 
jected found it not very hard to silence their protests. So 
it came about that the most of Britain fell into the hands 
of these invaders and the home of the English language 
was transferred to the island which has been its central 
dwelling place ever since, the native British being killed 
or enslaved, or driven into the hills of Cornwall, or the 
mountains of Wales, or across the border into Scotland or 
across the water into Ireland. 

It took only about one hundred and fifty years or less 
to complete this process: about 450 A. D., the Jutes were 



36 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

settled in Kent, the part of south-eastern England of 
which Canterbury was the chief town; a little later the 
South Saxons were at home in Sussex, the country just 
south of the Thames river, and the West Saxons were 
living in Wessex, the country between Sussex and Corn- 
wall, with Winchester as their chief town. The Angles, 
mean time, were taking possession of the rest of the coun- 
try, and by 547, had spread over all northern England and 
southern Scotland. This region was afterwards divided, 
for the Angles quarreled fiercely among themselves. For 
the purposes of our study it is not essential to try to un- 
ravel the complexities of the shifting political relations of 
these tribes; but we need to note two main divisions of 
the Angles, Northumbria and Mercia; Mercia the region 
between the Thames and the Humber rivers, with London, 
originally confined to the north bank of the Thames, as 
its chief city, and Northumbria reaching up to the Frith 
of Forth, in what is now Scotland, with York as its most 
important town. In these early days the Angles were the 
most numerous and important tribe, and it was among 
them that the earliest civilization and the first works of 
literature were developed. So it came about that their 
name was given to the whole country, and to the whole 
people, and has at last absorbed into itself the names of 
all the other nations and tribes who have in later times 
mingled with the people of Great Britain — Jute, Saxon, 
Angle, Dane, Norman, Scotch, Irish and a hundred others 
being now included in the one word English. 

These invading tribes brought with them their own 
modes of speech, taking up into their language a very few 
words from their conquered Celtic neighbors, and a few 
Latin terms, relics of the period of Roman occupation. 
The Jutes had their own way of speaking English, now 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 37 

known as the Kentish dialect, of which there are some 
examples preserved; a metrical version of the fiftieth 
Psalm, a hymn, and some glosses or comments on the 
Latin Scriptures. The two divisions of the Angles above 
referred to, had each its own dialect, the Mercian being 
that from which the forms and the vocabulary of modern 
English have most directly descended, and of which the 
most important relic is an interlinear version of the Psalms. 
The dialect of the other division of the Angles, the North- 
umbrians, was the first to produce a literature — as the 
Northumbrians early became leaders in government and 
in the arts of civilization. They became Christians at 
nearly the same time with the Jutes and Saxons, partly 
through the preaching of Celtic missionaries from Ireland 
and Scotland, but probably more through the efforts of 
the Latin missionaries from Rome. They developed a 
civilization, advanced for the time, built many abbeys, 
monasteries and churches, established schools and libra- 
ries, and produced valuable works of literature. The 
earliest poetry written in English, of which we have knowl- 
edge, was in the Northumbrian dialect; Caedmon, the 
traditional first poet, is said to have been a servant in a 
Northumbrian monastery; Cynewulf, the author of some 
of the most important Old English writings, was probably 
a Northumbrian ; and the venerable Bede, the first English 
scholar and historian, was of the same stock. Unfortu- 
nately almost all these Northumbrian writings, in their 
original form, have been lost. They were written over 
again in the West Saxon dialect; and so we have the sub- 
stance of them as well as of the epic Beowulf, and some 
other anonymous pieces of the earliest period, which may 
have originated in the pre-British England. For the 
Northumbrian dialect we are dependent upon a few relics, 



38 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the most important of which is the "Lindisfarne Gospels, " 
a translation of the gospels into this form of speech. One 
short piece of Northumbrian poetry was discovered not 
many years since, called Caedmon's "Hymnus;" perhaps 
the first bit of verse written by the first English poet. 

The fourth dialect of Old English is the West Saxon, 
the form of English spoken by Alfred the Great and that 
in which is written almost all the Old English literature 
we possess. Alfred was himself a scholar and original 
writer; he encouraged others to write; and under the in- 
fluence of his example and encouragement, a number of 
scholarly clergymen prepared translations from the Bible 
and from Latin authors and also composed homilies or 
sermons, and lives of the saints. Work of this sort con- 
tinued to be produced in West Saxon for a hundred years 
or more; the old Northumbrian literature was, as has been 
already noticed, largely rewritten in this dialect; the Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle, a condensed record of historical events, 
was kept through the whole period; and a few pieces of 
more imaginative writing, like the "Battle of Brunan- 
burgh, " and "Maldon, " were produced. This, therefore, 
is the form of Old English which affords the best material 
for study; it is the Old English or Anglo-Saxon which is 
taught in our colleges and universities, though thorough 
students of the subject will of course seek, so far as the 
materials are available, to acquaint themselves with the 
other dialects. 

There were two great historical events which largely 
modified the English language during this period; they 
were the conversion of the English to Christianity, and 
the Danish invasions and conquest. We have already 
noticed that the first of these great events was brought 
about by two different influences: the work of the Celtic 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 39 

missionaries who came from Ireland by way of Scotland, 
and established the Christian faith among the people of 
northern England; and the work of the Latin missionaries 
who came from Rome, began their labors among the Jutes, 
in Kent, and finally succeeded in reaching all the English 
tribes and bringing the Celtic Christians themselves into 
connection with the Roman church. This is by far the 
more important for the purpose of our study because it 
had by far the greater influence upon the development of 
the language, since it was the occasion of the first large 
addition of Latin elements to English. As the religion of 
the country took the Latin form the names of religious 
officials and religious functions came to be generally Latin 
names; and thus Latin, with the Hebrew and Greek that 
came through it, made its first strong and significant im- 
pression upon English. The other great historical event 
of the period, the Danish invasion and conquest, was a 
negative and destructive as well as a positive and con- 
structive influence upon the language. The Danes were 
fierce and savage heathen as the English had been when 
they invaded Britain; they burned and destroyed wherever 
they went, and they went burning and destroying all over 
northern England. The monasteries, abbeys and churches 
which the Northumbrians had built were almost all de- 
stroyed and their libraries w T ere burned. Thus it hap- 
pened that the Northumbrian literature, in its original 
form, was practically annihilated; and if it had not been 
for the West Saxon scholars, who preserved these old poems 
and rewrote them in their own dialect, we should have 
known nothing about the old epic of Beowulf , or the poems 
of Caedmon and Cynewulf. The destruction of the 
Northumbrian dialect as a literary language and the sub- 
stitution for it of West Saxon, may, therefore, be mainly 



40 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

attributed to the Danish invasions. The other, the posi- 
tive, constructive effect of those invasions was the intro- 
duction into English of Danish words and grammatical 
forms. The Danes did not exterminate or drive out the 
English as the English had exterminated or driven out 
the Britons. They ruled them for a time; they settled 
down beside them and mingled with them in social and 
political life; and thus there came about a considerable 
blending of the languages, a result made easier by the fact 
that Danish is a Teutonic language, and so more closely 
akin to English than the Celtic speech of the Britons. 

Summing up this review of the historic conditions of the 
Old English period, we find the following facts important 
from the point of view of the student of language. Eng- 
lish had its origin in northern Germany among the Low 
German tribes known as Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, where 
it felt very slight if any influence from Latin civilization, 
considerable influence from its Scandinavian neighbors, 
and probably developed a primitive, perhaps unwritten 
literature. By the withdrawal of the Romans from Brit- 
ain the way was opened for the emigration of these Ger- 
manic tribes and their conquest of the Britons, resulting 
in the establishment of the English language in the regions 
now known as England and southern Scotland. The 
language as thus established existed in four distinct dia- 
lects, Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian and West Saxon; 
and shows slight traces" of influence from the Celtic of the 
conquered tribes, and from the few Latin words and phrases 
which had been left fastened upon the Celtic by the Ro- 
mans. Following upon the conversion of the English 
tribes to Latin Christianity, a strong Latin element is 
introduced into the vocabulary, mainly through the medi- 
um of religious ideas; the Latin alphabet and Latin gram- 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 41 

matical forms are adopted, and a notable literary develop- 
ment takes place, especially marked among the Anglians 
of Northumbria. Finally, the Danish invasion and con- 
quest results in the addition of a considerable Scandina- 
vian element to the vocabulary. Through these Danish 
invasions, the literary monuments of the Northumbrian 
civilization are destroyed; but by the literary awakening 
of the West Saxons under the leadership of Alfred, this 
literature is preserved in West Saxon form, and by the 
labors of West Saxon writers for a century or more, a con- 
siderable body of historical and religious prose, with a few 
bits of original poetry are produced in that dialect. 

This is the situation, at the middle of the eleventh cen- 
tury, before the appearance of the strong Norman-French 
influences, which brought about the great changes of the 
Middle-English period. A sentence from the Anglo-Saxon 
Gospels will serve to show graphically just what the Eng- 
lish language was like at this period and prepare us for 
the more detailed study of the sound changes, the vocabu- 
lary, and the grammar, which will follow in the subse- 
quent chapters. 

"Heofona rice is gelic 3aem cyninge 9e 

of the heavens the kingdom is like that king who 
macode his suna giefta and sende his 3eowas 

made his son wedding feasts and sent his servants 
and clipode 3a gela3odan to 3aem gieftum. " • 
and called those invited to these wedding feasts. 

At first sight, this looks to one unfamiliar with the subject, 
very different indeed from modern English ; but if the words 
in the upper lines are carefully observed in comparison 
with the literal translation under them the difference will 



42 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

not appear so radical. The alphabet is the same with the 
exception of one character which is the Old English equiv- 
alent of "th." The words "is," "his/' "and," "to," 
are precisely the same in form and meaning; we can see 
the substantial identity in the pairs: "heofona, heavens," 
"gelic, like," "cyninge, king," "macode, made," "suna, 
son," "sende, sent;" leaving comparatively few which 
have entirely passed out of use or changed their use and 
meaning. This is a fair illustration of the simpler pas- 
sages in Old English, and shows clearly enough that the 
core of the language is essentially the sam£, the most famil- 
iar words being easily recognizable in their ancient forms. 
This brief extract, with the longer specimens of Old 
English given in the latter part of the book, will show what 
the language has become through the effect of the various 
historical movements just described; and we shall do well 
to keep these examples before our minds while we proceed 
to inquire more particularly into the special characteristics 
of the language in the Old English period. 



CHAPTER III 

Period of Old English. The Vocabulary. 

IN the Old English vocabulary is found the core of the 
language. As compared with Modern English the 
number of words is small, and of that small number 
a large proportion are not preserved in use at all, their 
places being taken by words derived from other languages . 
Yet the importance of the native element in the vocabu- 
lary is not to be measured by its number. In modern 
dictionaries to be sure, about seventy-five per cent of the 
words are of foreign derivation; but eloser observation 
shows that these are to a large extent technical terms which 
are used by only a very limited number of speakers or 
writers, and that in general, the less familiar words are of 
this class. In the English Bible, King James Version, 
only about six per cent of the words are of foreign deriva- 
tion; in such a modern writer as Tennyson only about 
twelve per cent; and even in the classical period of Eng- 
lish Literature when the tendency to use words of Latin 
derivation was at its height, the extreme was reached in 
Gibbon's thirty per cent. The reason for this preponder- 
ance of pure English roots in the diction of the best writers 
is that the familiar, easily understood words, those which 
have the most suggestive power from their resemblance 
in sound to the thing signified, those which have gathered 
to themselves the richest body of connotative association, 
those which most tersely compress large ideas into small 

43 



44 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

compass, these words most useful for common talk and for 
awakening the imagination, are to a very large extent the 
words of pure English derivation. The every day words 
of universal interest: home, house, field, father, mother, 
day, night, land, sea, rain, snow, sun, star, tree; good, evil 
black, white, strong; love, weep, laugh, go, come, sleep, 
stand, run, speak, write, read, fall; such words as these 
are in very large proportion pure English. So are almost 
all the connectives: prepositions, conjunctions, particles, 
auxiliaries ; which though small and apparently insignificant 
are the nails and bolts and mortar of all our language 
buildings. 

There are two principal methods by which words are 
added to a language : Development from native roots, the 
method specially characteristic of German among modern 
languages, but also very important in the earlier periods 
of English; and Borrowing from other languages, the 
method specially characteristic of English, notably in the 
Middle and Modern periods. In Old English, Develop- 
ment from the original roots was by far the more important 
method, and proceeded in two main ways : first the putting 
together of old roots to form new words, or " Compound- 
ing, " and second the inflection of original stems according 
to the laws of sound change, some of which have been re- 
ferred to, and will be more fully discussed in the chapters 
on " Sound Changes " and " Grammar. " New compounds 
may be made by putting together two or more complete 
words so that the process is perfectly simple and manifest. 
A good example of this method is the word "steadfast;" 
stead being the Old English word for place, and fast being 
used in the sense of firm, rather than of swift. Thus the 
compound means firm in one's place. A man who stays 
put, like a well set post, is steadfast. When we see two 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 45 

words joined by a hyphen, as "red-hot," "co-operate," 
we see a compound word in the process of making. It 
may be adopted into the language as a useful accredited 
word, in which case, sometime or other the hyphen will 
drop out, nobody knowing just when or where; or it may 
be neglected and forgotten, and the elements fall apart, 
equally without the knowledge or the conscious consent 
of any one. It is really mysterious how these changes in 
a language get themselves done. New compounds are 
made also in a way not quite so simple and manifest. In 
many cases one of the elements has been abbreviated, or 
has been used in compounding so frequently, its form 
changing in the process, that it is no longer recognized as 
a separate word. Thus from the noun friend an adjective 
is made by adding to it the suffix "ly" making the familiar 
word "friendly." If we study this suffix we shall see that 
it is an abbreviation of the adjective "like," or as it was 
spelled in Old English, "lie," for the word in Old English 
is "freondlic." So when it was desired to have a negative 
adjective expressing the state of feeling of one who is not 
a friend and yet not quite an enemy, the negative prefix 
"un" was put before the adjective friendly, and we have 
the new word "un-friend-ly, " one word made out of three, 
two of which are apparently not known to the language as 
independent words though one of them can be traced 
easily to its original. One easy way to know words of 
Latin origin is by the Latin prefixes : con, de, ab, per, pro, 
etc., which are freely used in the formation of words; 
though it must be borne in mind that these prefixes are 
sometimes used with English roots or with words from 
other languages, such hybrids, however, being rather rare 
exceptions. To this class of particles belong many of the 
inflectional endings of nouns and verbs, though the original 



46 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

words from which these endings came, if they did come 
from distinct words, are not now known. For example, 
the "s" or "es" of the Genitive or Possessive singular is 
probably not, as might be supposed, an abbreviation of 
"his," but comes from the case form of the Old English 
"O" Declension; the other Declensions having different 
forms for the corresponding case which cannot in any way 
be connected with the pronoun "his." The tendency of 
the English seems to have been steadily away from this 
method of Development of new words from old roots. In 
the nature of things there would be a limit to the process; 
and we find that in German, late compounds are sometimes 
excessively long and complicated. English sometimes 
takes a compound word bodily from another language 
rather than form one no more complex from its own roots. 
For example, German expresses the idea we celebrate on 
the Fourth of July by a word made out of the negative 
prefix "un," the preposition "ab," the verbal adjective 
"hangig, " and the abstract suffix "keit, " making the 
rather awkward compound "unabhangigkeit." A possi- 
ble English word of the same sort, which seems ludicrously 
barbarous would be "unfromhangyness;" but instead of 
attempting any such feat of compounding, English reaches 
over into the Latin vocabulary and takes a word formed 
in exactly the same way, "in-de-pend-ence." Because it 
is from another language and its component parts are 
unfamiliar its composite nature does not make so strong 
an impression and the word does not seem so awkward. 
There are advantages in both methods of word formation. 
The method of compounding has the advantage of being 
more immediately intelligible, as one who knows the 
language will probably be able to put together the ideas 
suggested by the elements of the new word, and come 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 47 

pretty near to the new idea intended by the word coiner. 
The attendant disadvantage is that the members of the 
new compound are likely to carry with them the associa- 
tions of their, previous use, and thus the new idea is in 
danger of being blurred. The English method of taking 
the word for the new idea from a foreign language has the 
disadvantage that the average man will probably have to 
learn the meaning of the new word with little help from 
his previous knowledge; but with this goes the great ad- 
vantage that the new word is free from old associations 
and is likely to make a clear, distinct, unblurred impres- 
sion. It would not be easy to prove that either method 
is on the whole better than the other. Probably a more 
equal blending of the two would give the best results; 
compounding for poetical, suggestive, emotional language, 
and borrowing for exact, scientific and philosophical pur- 
poses. 

Old English, as has been pointed out already, is charac- 
terized by the great predominance of words of pure Eng- 
lish origin. It has, however a small element of loanwords, 
borrowed from the peoples with whom the English of this 
first period of their history were associated; and a study 
of this early borrowed element will be of interest, as show- 
ing how early the language began the practice of strength- 
ening itself by drawing upon the resources of its neighbors, 
and also as illustrating the connection between the lan- 
guage growth and the social conditions and historical 
events with which it coincided in time. 

There are enough words of Latin origin found in the 
earliest examples of English to make it evident that the 
Angles, Jutes and Saxons, in their old home on the sea- 
coast of Northern Germany and on the banks of the Elbe 
and the Weser rivers, had some little commercial inter- 



48 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

course with the Romans. Among the household articles 
of food and drink were "wine," "butter," "pepper," 
"cheese, " words whose Latin origin points to Rome as the 
source of supply, or at least as the source of their knowledge 
how to supply themselves with these things. Evidently 
it is the luxuries of life which the English of this period 
associate with Rome and call by Latin names; and the 
word "silk," also of Latin origin, points to the same con- 
clusion. Also these primitive English seem to have taken 
from the Romans lessons in weighing and measuring, for 
they brought with them to Britain the Latin loan words 
"pound," "inch" and "mile." It is further significant 
and suggestive that the Old English word for coin was 
"minit," the original of modern mint, which came directly 
from Latin "moneta" and belongs to this earliest period 
of the language, "money" having come later from the 
same root, but by way of the French "monnaie. " 

As these words from the oldest Latin element of English 
throw a little light upon the life of the people at a very 
early period, so there are a few Celtic words belonging to 
the same general epoch, words which remain in English as 
relics of the first intercourse between the two races, which 
may help to form a picture of the life of these people as the 
English found them. Celtic etymology is very uncertain; 
and investigation is constantly showing that words which 
were supposed to be of Britannic or Gaelic origin are to be 
traced to other sources, or have been adopted into Welsh 
or Scottish Gaelic from English. So, as to the words cited 
in the following passage, all that can be positively asserted 
is that they either come from the old Celtic or have analo- 
gous and closely similar equivalents in old Britannic or 
Gaelic. We may therefore fairly treat them as expressive 
of the life of the British before the English conquest. In 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 49 

the home of the Celtic peasant in Britain there was prob- 
ably no "chimney," for that word is of Latin derivation 
and came to English through French, as the thing was a 
product of later civilization; and through the smoky air 
we might see the respected "dad" of the household, who 
may be "bald," and near whom is playing a sturdy elvish 
little "brat." In the "crock" on the floor there may be 
a piece of "pie;" but this is simply suggested as possible, 
because the etymologists discredit the Celtic origin of 
this word in spite of Gaelic "pighe, " and the thing itself 
if it existed was certainly very different from the noble 
article of New England diet loved and honored by the 
immortal Emerson. If we watch the old man closely as 
he rises to go out we may see that he is disagreeably "gog- 
gle-eyed." Perhaps a "clock," which is something in the 
nature of a bell calls him to some gathering, where a " druid" 
leads his devotions, or a "bard" expresses his social or 
national ideals. If he goes to the field he may have to 
get "dock" out of his "kale" crop; and perhaps he may 
do this with a "mattock." If he gets to "bickering" 
with any of his fellow workmen he may swing a "bat," 
such as now serves the more peaceful uses of the baseball 
or cricket player. 

The Celts of Britain, when conquered by the English, 
had been for four centuries under the Roman Government, 
and the mark of this Roman supremacy is very distinct 
in a small group of words of Latin origin which have worked 
their way through Celtic into English and have sur- 
vived in modern English. Not uncommon in the United 
States are names of towns, cities, counties and families 
ending in " Chester," "cester," and "caster;" such as 
Manchester, Worcester, Lancaster. Every one under- 
stands that these names are English in origin, and simply 



50 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

repeat or continue names of places or persons in England; 
but probably few of the inhabitants of such places or the 
bearers of such family names realize that they are im- 
perishable monuments of the Roman occupation of Brit- 
ain. This form " Chester," with its variants, "cester" 
and "castra, " comes from the "castra" or fortified camps 
which made Rome's grip firm upon its conquered territory. 
Roman walled towns and the great wall which the Romans 
built across the country to help keep back the northern 
invaders have left their mark upon the language in the 
word "wall;" and the improvements which Rome brought 
to the social and commercial life of Britain are illustrated 
by the words "street" and "port." 

A much larger group of words of Latin origin came into 
English in connection with the conversion of the people to 
Christianity. As the missionary work which had the 
widest and most permanent effect was that of the monks 
from Rome, as early English Christianity used the Latin 
Vulgate Bible, and as all, even the churches of Celtic origin, 
soon became organically connected with the church of 
Rome, it was inevitable that the formal church life, or the 
religious ideas and feelings as they found expression in 
public worship and in organized religious activity should 
speak largely through Latin words. The individual relig- 
ious life still expressed itself in its native English; the 
Divine name remained "God," not any derivative of 
Latin "Deus, " and English words were used for the com- 
ing near of the soul to God, the Latin words "prayer" 
and "penitence" not coming into general use till the 
period of French influence; but the formal, public, more 
external or official religious life speaks in such words as 
"mass," "organ," "font," associated with liturgy or 
worship; "creed," for the statement of belief; "monk" 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 51 

and "bishop," in the form "biscop, " for the organization 
of religious institutions; and "alms," in the form "aelm- 
ysse" for the activities of the religious life. Some of these 
Latin words are Greek forms Latinized, and some of them 
go back to Hebrew for their original form. Most of the 
religious terms were drawn from the Latin Vulgate version 
of the Bible, which was a translation from the Greek New 
Testament, the Greek version of the Old Testament known 
as the Septuagint, and the Hebrew Old Testament; for 
St. Jerome, the chief author of the Vulgate, was a Hebrew 
scholar. So we have traces of these two ancient languages 
in the religious vocabulary of the Old English period. For 
example, the words "cherub," in the form "cerubin, " 
"hosanna, " "amen," come from Hebrew, but in the form 
they take in English show the effect of the Greek and 
Latin through which they came. Words, thus, may 
gather form and meaning from a number of languages 
through which they pass on their way into English. The 
word " Christian, " for example, has a remarkable history in 
this respect. "Messiah," in Hebrew, meant the "an- 
nointed one," or the great divine deliverer whom every 
pious Israelite expected to come from God. When Greek 
became the most widely used language of the civilized 
world and the Old Testament Scriptures were translated 
into that language, this w r ord "Messiah" was rendered by 
the Greek word "Christos." When the believers in Jesus 
as the true fulfillment of the messianic hope applied the 
word to Him and called Him "Christos" or the Christ, 
their neighbors took the word for the party name for the 
new sect, gave it an adjective termination and thus pro- 
duced the Greco-Latin word "Christianus." When the 
word was adopted into English the custom of Anglo-Saxon 
speech changed the spelling to "Cristen;" later Latin in- 



52 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

fluence carried the spelling back again toward the older 
form; and thus we have the word "Christian," showing 
in its meaning and form traces of the hope, devotion, 
thought, and instinctive action of Hebrews, Syrians, 
Greeks, Romans and English; of faithful Israelites, of 
early believers in Jesus, of Pagan opponents of Christianity, 
and of ancient Teutonic converts to Christ. "What's in 
a name?" Sometimes it would take more than a chapter 
or a volume to tell all that there is in a name. The Latin 
missionaries seem to have brought to their English con- 
verts some of the luxuries of Roman civilization. At any 
raffe we find in the literature of this period the word "can- 
dle," in the form "condel;" and in quite another sphere 
of the pleasant things of life, "dish," "capon" and "ket- 
tle, " unless the latter word is even earlier. These Latin 
teachers introduced our ancestors to the "Devil," or at 
least to "Deofol" for the Greco-Latin "Diabolus" as the 
name of an evil spirit, but they made amends as best they 
could, by making them acquainted at the same time with 
the "Englas" or "Angels." 

From the large number of Danish words which came 
into English as the result of Danish invasions and govern- 
ment during this period, a very few may be taken as repre- 
sentatives, suggesting the lines of contact between the 
two peoples. Thus the words "hustings," "law" and 
"outlaw" show that the Danes, at this time, like the 
Normans of a later period, had the governmental machin- 
ery to a considerable extent in their hands. The social 
blending of the races may be illustrated by the fact that 
while English "wif," "wife" remains in use, ^Danish 
"hus-bonda," "husband" takes the place of the less 
exact English "mann," for the other side of the family 
partnership. 



CHAPTER IV 

Period of Old English. Alphabet and Sound Changes. 

THE Old English Alphabet was taken from the 
Latin with a few additions, omissions and altera- 
tions of use, to fit it to the needs of English 
speech. The vowel sounds corresponded to 
those of the originaf Latin, which have been preserved 
with few important changes in the European languages 
derived more directly from Latin, those known as the 
Romance languages. Thus one who is familiar with the 
vowel sounds of Italian or French will have little difficulty 
with those sounds in Old English; for the peculiar shift in 
the use of the letters "A," "E," and "I," by which in 
modern English we give to long "A" the old sound of long 
"E," to long "E" the old sound of long "I," and to long 
"I" a new sound apparently compounded of old broad 
"A" and old long "I;" this peculiar change in the use of 
the letters had certainly not taken place in the time of 
Chaucer, as appears plainly from his rhymes, and there- 
fore, a fortiori, could not have taken place in the Old 
English period. The long "A," then, of this period, as 
found in the word "3a" in the sentence from the Anglo- 
Saxon Gospels, page 41, must have been the broad sound 
of "A" in the modern word "father." The usual short 
"A," as in the word "and," in the same selection, must 
have been nearly like that of the modern German in the 
word "man." For the close short "A" in such words as 
modern "hat," "that," "cat," Old English used the 

53 



54 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

combination "ae," as in the words "aet ' "daeg," 
"hwaet." This sound lengthened is found in the above 
selection in the word "3aem," "them." "E" had the 
two sounds given to it in all the Romance languages and 
found in modern English in such words as "fete, " a word 
recently borrowed from French, and "pet," the usual 
modern short "E." These sounds are found in the selec- 
tion in the words "3eowas, " and "sende." So, long "I" 
was sounded as we now pronounce it in "machine," 
"pique," and other such words usually of recent French 
derivation, and short "I" just as now sounded in "it," 
"pit," etc., "I" never having in Old or Middle English 
the sound of modern "write." In the selection, we find 
these sounds represented in the words "gellc" and "is." 
Long "O" had the same sound as in modern "spoke, " and 
is found in the specimen sentence in the familiar word "to," 
where "O" had the long sound, the "U" sound we now 
give it in that word being a modern change. The open 
short "o" of Old English was very nearly if not exactly 
the same as that we now give the letter in such words as 
"hot," "pot," "lot." It was characteristic of the letter 
"o" when used before the nasal consonants "M" or "N, " 
where it takes the place of an earlier "A;" and may there- 
fore be properly regarded as an "A" rather than a true 
"O" sound. Our specimen sentence affords no examples 
of this sound, which is found in the words "hond, " "lond, " 
etc., where, in many manuscripts, the "O" is used in place 
of an earlier short "A." The usual short "O" of old 
English was a close sound like that of the words "dog," 
and "God," as ordinarily pronounced. In the specimen 
sentence we have no example of this sound in an accented 
syllable, but unaccented, it is found in the words "macode" 
and "clipode. " "U" in Old English, never had the sound 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 55 

we usually give it when short and that which we give also 
very often to "0, " in the words "sun," "son," for ex- 
ample; nor is there any evidence of the intrusion of the 
consonant "Y" sound which modern English permits in 
such words as "duty," and "cure." These usages are 
later variations in English pronunciation. Long "U" in 
Old English had the sound we give the letter in the word 
"lure, " and more frequently express by the spelling "oo, " 
in words like "boot," "shoot," etc., or by "ou" in words 
of French derivation like "tour," "route," or even by 
"ough" in the word "through." The short sound, an 
example of which in the specimen sentence is the word 
"suna, " was that of modern English "put," more fre- 
quently expressed by "oo, " as in "cook, " "foot, " "took, " 
etc. The letter "Y, " as found in the word "cyning, " 
"king," was used exclusively as a vowel and corresponded 
to the German umlaut. "u" as it is found in such words 
as "griin" and "briicke." Other vowel sounds or com- 
binations of sound were expressed by digraphs and diph- 
thongs, none of which have persisted in modern English 
in the same form and with the same value. " EA, " " EO, " 
"IE," "10," were digraphs; that is they expressed not a 
blended sound but two sounds pronounced rapidly to- 
gether, the stress upon the first element, the second re- 
duced to a mere glide. Examples of two of these are 
"giefta, " "heofona, " in the specimen sentence. "OE, " a 
rare form, was used for the sound of the German umlaut 
" O, " as in the w r ord " schon. " It will be noticed that the 
familiar diphthongs "AI," "AU," "EI," "EY," "EU," 
"OA," "01," "OU," "OY," with all the combinations 
of other vowels with "W, " are missing. Most of these 
sounds as they appear in modern English are the result of 
Middle English or yet later sound changes. "W" had 



56 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the same consonantal value as now — a good example is 
the word "3eowas" in the specimen sentence, — but it was 
a weak consonant frequently losing its place and giving 
way to the vowel "U." Indeed the consonantal use of 
"U," in modern English, in the combination "qu," cor- 
responds to Old English "W;" as such words as "queen," 
"quick," "quoth," were spelled, in Old English "cwen," 
"cwic," "cwajD." 

Of the consonants there were two in Old English which 
are no longer used. They are the Thorn letter, J), and 
Thet, 9, both used for the sounds we now express by "th. " 
It is possible that one of these characters at some time 
stood for the voiceless "th, " as in "thing," and the other 
for the voiced sound as in "this;" but if so the distinction 
was lost sight of before the date of any manuscripts yet 
examined. They are used indiscriminately in all the 
familiar West Saxon writings. "9aem, " and "9eowas," 
in the specimen sentence, show the use of the letter "thet" 
(9). The Thorn letter slightly changed is still seen some- 
times in printing which affects the archaic, in the word 
"ye," used for "the." Here the first letter is not, as 
most readers and most writers and printers probably sup- 
pose a "y, " but a mistaken attempt to imitate the Old 
English Thorn letter in the word "jie." The letter "K" 
is little us^d in Old English because "C" is always given 
the hard sound we now give it before the vowels "A," 
"O, " "U." A good example is found in the specimen 
sentence in the word "cyning, " pronounced "kuning. " 
" V" does not appear in Old English, its sound, the voiced 
or sonant "F" being usually expressed by that letter. 
This sound, however, was sometimes expressed in foreign 
words by the letter "U, " which later sometimes gave place 
to the Latin "V." Hence arose considerable confusion in 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 57 

the manuscripts, and "V' : came finally into general use 
for this sound. The general rule as to "F" was that in- 
itially, as in "faeder, " father, it had the voiceless sound, 
while medially, as in the specimen, in the word "heofona, " 
and finally, as in "of" it had the voiced sound. The letter 
"G" had frequently in Old English the palatal sound we 
now express by consonant "Y." Thus in the specimen 
sentence, "gelic" would be pronounced "yeleek. " Many 
Old English words which were spelled with "G," are now 
spelled with " Y, " as for example, "daeg, " "day, "; "gear," 
"year." "G" had the hard sound, as in modern "go," 
or "dig," only when doubled, as Old English "frogga, " or 
in combination with "N, " as in words like "long," "sing- 
an, " etc. Something like the sound we give it in such 
words as "genuine," or when combined with "D" in words 
like "judge," was found in the Old English combination 
"eg," as in the word "ryeg, " pronounced exactly like its 
modern equivalent "ridge." The letter "H" was always 
sounded in Old English, according to the general rule that 
there were no silent letters. The sound was very nearly 
that of German "ch" in such words as "buch, " "reich, " 
etc. Where in modern English we have the spelling "gh, " 
in Old English there was simply "H;" thus Modern Eng- 
lish "light" was in Old English "liht;" Modern English 
"right," was in Old English, "riht;" Modern English 
"fight" was in Old English "feoht," and so on in many 
examples. A possible explanation of the intrusion of this 
"G" is found in the fact that "G" was the one apparent 
exception to the rule that in Old English there was no use 
of silent letters. The letter "G" was sometimes used by 
the scribes to indicate that the letter following it was to be 
distinctly pronounced. Thus one of the forms of the 
feminine personal pronoun was "hie," where there might 



58 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

be a tendency on the part of the reader to make the "ie" 
a diphthong, or at least a digraph, the "E" being thus 
practically lost in the "I." To prevent this the scribes 
sometimes wrote the word "hige," the "G" in this case 
being called graphic, and simply indicating that the "E" 
following it was to be sounded distinctly and not reduced 
to a glide. If, however, the attempt is made to pronounce 
this word in this fashion, sounding both vowels distinctly, 
it will be noticed that between the two vowels a conso- 
nant "Y" has appeared, so that after all the "G" in this 
case is not really silent, and our general statement remains 
good. Now the theory of some scholars is that the French 
tendency to omit the sound of "H" in such words as "liht, " 
"riht, " "feoht, " etc., led the English scribes to put this 
graphic "G" before it, not meaning that the "G" is to be 
taken as an essential part of the word, but simply to empha- 
size the fact that according to good English usage the "H" 
ought to be sounded. The French usage prevailed in the 
pronunciation, but the unavailing effort of the scribes to 
maintain the old sounds remains to vex us in this, perhaps 
the worst anomaly among the many anomalies of modern 
English spelling. In the specimen sentence the examples 
of "II" are all initial, and the words were probably sound- 
ed much as in Modern English, except that there was a 
stronger palatal sound than would be usual now. The low- 
land Scotch use of "H" in such words as "liht," "loch," 
etc., probably preserves very nearly the Old English pro- 
nunciation. "S" had the sharp voiceless sound when 
used initially, and indeed always except when occurring 
singly between vowels. In this position, as in the word 
"risan, " pronounced "reezan, " it had the voiced or 
sonant sound. The letter " W" has been referred to, and 
its consonant value pointed out, among the vowels. It 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 59 

should be added here that one of its uses in combination 
with another letter affords another excellent illustration 
of the superior rationality of Old English spelling as com- 
pared with that of Modern English. This is seen in such 
words as "what," "when," and "while," in which the 
old usage put the " H " before the " W, " spelling the words, 
"hwaet, " "hwaenne, " "hwil, " as we certainly do in 
uttering the sound. The letter "X" was irregularly used 
in Old English, some of the words in which we now use it 
having been formerly spelled with the combinations "CS, " 
"HS," "KS;" and its largest use was in words taken from 
Latin. . 

Summing up then, as to the Alphabet, we find that the 
vowels were the same as in Modern English except that 
"W" was not so used; and that their sounds corresponded 
in general to those given them in the other Indo-European 
languages. Of the consonants "B, " "D, " "K" (when 
used), L, M, JN, F, K, 1, Y\, X, 
(when used), had the same values as now; "C\ "F, " 
"G, " "H, " "S, " have been more or less changed in their 
use; Thet, 3, and the Thorn letter, J), have been lost, their 
place being taken by the combination "th;" "J," "Q, " 
and "V" do not appear, coming into English use from 
Latin through French, in later periods. The old digraphs 
and diphthongs, " AE, " "EA, " "EO, " "IE, " "10, " "OE, " 
have disappeared, the sounds they expressed, when still in 
use, being given by other letters and combinations of let- 
ters. 

Old English shows clearly the working of a law of sound 
change that is characteristic of all Teutonic languages. It 
is sometimes called the "Great Consonant Shift;" but as 
it was first formulated by the German Philologist, Grimm, 
it is generally referred to in works on language as " Grimm's 



60 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Law." Students of language have noticed, for example, 
that in all Teutonic languages, the word for "father," 
however it might otherwise differ in spelling, begins with 
the letter "F," or its equivalent "V;" Old English "fae- 
der," German "vater, " Dutch, "vader, " Norwegian 
"fader;" while the corresponding word in other Indo- 
European languages began with "P," as Latin "pater," 
Greek, iratyp, Sanscrit, "pitar. " So it was noticed that 
words beginning with "D" in Teutonic languages, begin 
with "TH, " or its equivalent in the older Indo-European; 
words beginning with "H" in Teutonic, begin with "C," 
(" K ") , in the older Indo-European. Further study showed 
that these correspondences do not occur in Celtic, Balto- 
Slavic, or later Italic tongues, like French or Italian; and 
that they are not confined to the initial letters; but that 
in all Teutonic languages, and in them only, there appears 
to be a regular shift of the consonants; certain letters being 
regularly substituted for certain others in the same class; 
that is, labials for labials, dentals for dentals, and palatals 
for palatals. The table below illustrates this consonant 
shift. 

Grimm's Law: Consonants shift from the older Indo- 
European languages to the Teutonic, in a regular order, 
illustrated by the following table:. 

Older Indo-European Teutonic 

Labials. F shifts to B 

Frater (Latin) Brother (English) 

B " " P 

Lubricus (Latin) . Slippery 

P " " F 

Pes (Latin) Foot 



a 



a 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



61 



Dentals TH 

Thura (Greek) 

D 

Duo (Latin) . . . 

T 

Tres (Latin) . . . 
Palatals H, (CH) 

Chen (Greek) . . 

G..^ 

Genu (Latin) . . 

CGQ 

Cornu (Latin).. 



D 

Door 

T 

Two 

Th 

Three 

G 

Goose 

C(K) 

Cneow, Knee 

(English) 
H 
Horn 



This law operated uniformly in the earliest history of 
the languages concerned, that is when the Teutonic forms 
of speech were developed from the earlier Indo-European 
mother tongues; but it does not operate in the borrowing 
of the loan words from Greek or Latin in later times. The 
law thus becomes a useful guide in determining the relative 
age of English words. For example, we know that "two" 
is an original English word, because we find that in the 
non-Teutonic Indo-European languages the correspond- 
ing words are spelled .with "D," according to Grimm's 
Law; as French "deux," Latin "duo," but we know that 
"dual," "duel," "duet," words from the same root, must 
be loan words or borrowings, because in them the shift 
does not appear, but the words keep the original Indo- 
European initial. So, "father" is evidently original, be- 
cause when compared with Latin "pater," the shift ap- 
pears; but "paternal" is just as clearly a loan word, be- 
cause it keeps the Latin spelling. 

Old English shows clearly also the working of another 



62 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

law of sound change, that of " Mutation," or "Umlaut," 
one that has had a very important effect upon the lan- 
guage. It is recognized, under the second name in all Ger- 
man grammars, and therefore will be somewhat familiar 
to those who have studied that language. In Modern 
English its effect is not always noted by school gramma- 
rians, but many familiar forms of words can be explained 
only by recognizing the influence of this law in English 
as well as in German. The law may be stated as follows : 
"Accented vowels are palatalized by an T in the following 
syllable, the T usually disappearing. " In the process of 
inflection, often, an "I" is added to the stem of the word; 
thus West Germanic "dohter, " had for its Dative singular 
"dohtri;" in Old English, the effect of this "I" was to 
change the open "O" to a close palatal "E," and then the 
"I" was dropped, leaving the Dative form "dehter." 
To illustrate the same law by a different process; from the 
old Germanic noun "Frank" an adjective was formed by 
adding the syllable "isc, " making the word "Frankisc;" 
the "I" in the added syllable palatalized the accented "A" 
to an "E, " giving 'Frenkisc;" then the "I" was dropped 
and the hard "C" softened, giving the modern adjective 
"French." By a similar process, from the old noun 
"Angel" was formed the adjective "English," and from 
this adjective the noun "England." To illustrate the 
same law by yet another process: from the adjective 
"hal, " whole, a verb was formed by the addition of the 
verbal suffix "ian, " giving "halian, " to heal or make 
whole; the "I" of the suffix palatalized the long "A" of 
the accented syllable, to long "AE, " and then the "I" 
disappeared, leaving the Old English verb "haelan, " 
which remains in Modern English in the word "heal." 
Perhaps the most interesting illustration of this law to 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 63 

modern readers is found in the case of those nouns which 
form their plural by a change of the vowel, instead of the 
addition of the usual sign of the plural. There are twenty- 
four such noims in Old English, and eight of them remain 
in modern usage. These are "man," "men;" "goose," 
'geese;" "mouse," "mice;" "louse," "lice;" "cow," 
'kine;" "tooth," "teeth;" "foot," "feet;" "brother," 
'brethren." Including these, Dr. Skeat gives, in his 
'Principles of English Etymology," a list of eighty in- 
stances of clear Mutation, or Umlaut, in Modern English. 
A third law of sound change clearly seen in Old English, 
and the influence of which is still traceable in Modern 
English forms, is that called "Gradation" or "Ablaut." 
It may be thus stated: "From the influence of changing 
accent or stress, vowel sounds change according to certain 
regular series or gradations." The clearest illustration of 
the working of this law is found in the principal parts of 
the strong verbs, incorrectly spoken of in some modern 
grammars as irregular. There are four series of gradations 
which can be made out in the modern forms, one of which, 
in Old English, is sub-divided into three, making six so- 
called "Ablaut" or "Gradation" conjugations. In Mod- 
ern English a good deal of confusion has been caused in 
these forms by the working of various tendencies which 
will be discussed later, and partly on account of this con- 
fusion, the verbs which show the influence of the law of 
gradation, have been classified as irregular; when in fact 
they form their various parts just as truly according to 
regular laws of inflection as do those so-called "regular," 
but correctly called "weak" verbs, which form their pret- 
erites by the addition of "D," "ED," or "T" to the 
stem. The verbs which show this law of "Gradation," 
in Modern English, and which belonged to the class of 



64 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



Ablaut" verbs in Old English, may be represented by 



the following four series: 












OLD 


ENGLISH 








Inf. 




Pret. 


P. Part. 


I. 


I, a, i, 


ridan 




rad 


riden 


II. 


eo, ea, o 


ceosan 




ceas 


coren 


III. 


i, a, u 


singan 




sang 


sungen 


IV. 


a, 6, a 


scacan 




scoc 


scacen 






MODERN 


ENGLISH 








Inf. 




Pret. 


P. Part 


I. 




ride 




rode 


ridden 


II. 




choose 




chose 


chosen 


III. 




sing 




sang 


sung 


IV. 




shake 




shook 


shaken 



There are many other examples of the working of this 
law in the various developments of conjugations and in 
the forming of new words out of old roots, as for example, 
the word " bier, " by a vowel change, from the verb " bear. " 
Vowel sounds constantly change under the influence of 
changing stress, and there remains much for students of 
phonology to do in making clear the delicate and compli- 
cated effects of these changes in the development of the 
English tongue. All that we have been able to do in this 
chapter has been to call attention to some of the more 
obvious in the multitude of changes in the uses of the alpha- 
bet, and to point out the working of the three fundamental 
laws: the "Great Consonant Shift," or "Grimm's Law;" 
"Mutation," or "Umlaut," and "Gradation," or "Ab- 
laut." 



CHAPTER V 

Period of Old English. Grammar. 

THE grammar of Old English, as we find it in the 
West-Saxon Literature, is an interesting com- 
bination of Teutonic elements, put laboriously 
into Latin forms. The result of this endeavor 
of the scholars of that early period to make the native 
English a scholarly tongue which might bear some com- 
parison to the classical and the ecclesiastical Latin in which 
they had been trained, was a very elaborate and complex 
grammatical system, which the genius of the practical 
English spirit has been simplifying ever since. The de- 
velopment of English grammar might be represented as 
the result of two conflicting linguistic tendencies : one this 
practical tendency to simplify by discarding forms that 
can be dispensed with, the other the racial tendency to 
seize upon and adapt to its own uses whatever seems 
available and valuable in other languages. 

Thus, as we consider the noun, we find that the West 
Saxon grammarians have given us a very complex system 
of Declensions based on the artificial genders, and using 
the Latin case names. The standard authorities on the 
subject give ten of these declensions; but it may be said of 
six out of these ten, that they serve to group together a 
small number of words which show more or less important 
variations from one or other of four leading types. The 
simplifying tendency of English has reduced these ten to 
two; and indeed all but ten of the nouns in English are 

65 



66 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

now declined according to the one type, and have but two 
case forms, one for all cases of the singular except the 
possessive, and the other for all cases of the plural and 
for the possessive singular; this, of course, being a general 
statement subject to exceptions which will be noticed 
carefully in the further discussion of the subject. 

The great majority of all masculine and neuter nouns 
were declined in Old English according to the "O" declen- 
sion, to use the terminology of the " Sievers-Cook Gram- 
mar of Old English, " to which work reference will be made 
in all this discussion. The characteristic inflections of this 
declension are "es" for the Genitive singular and "as" 
for the Nominative and Accusative plural masculine, and 
"u" for the Nominative and Accusative plural neuter, 
this "u, " however, being dropped whenever the accented 
vowel of the preceding syllable is long. The endings "a, " 
in the Genitive plural, and "urn" in the Dative and Instru- 
mental plural are found in all Old English nouns. The 
term Instrumental, just used, stands for the case in Old 
English most nearly corresponding to the Ablative in 
Latin. 

A large number of the feminine nouns are included in 
what is called the "A" declension, corresponding nearly 
to the First Declension in Latin. They have "u" nor- 
mally as the termination of the Nominative singular: as 
"caru," care; but this "u," like the "u" of the "O" 
declension plural neuter, disappears when the preceding 
accented vowel is long. In the singular these nouns form 
all the other cases in "e," and in the plural they form all 
except the Dative and Instrumental in "a. " In the Geni- 
tive plural, to distinguish it from the Nominative and 
Accusative, the letters "en" are often inserted before the 
final "a;" but this is not always found. None of the 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 67 

characteristic forms of this declension have persisted in 
Modern English; they have all been absorbed in forms of 
the "O" declension, as it has been modified by the passing 
years. 

Another large and important group of nouns is included 
in what is called the "Weak N Declension." Students 
of the German language will be familiar with this term 
"weak, " especially as it is applied to the declension of the 
Adjective. Its use is similar, as applied here to the Old 
English noun. Certain nouns, of all genders, ending in 
"a" or "e" in the Nominative singular, form all the other 
cases, except the Genitive and Dative-Instrumental plural 
by adding "n" to the stem. The excepted cases follow 
the general rule of "a" for the Genitive and "urn" for the 
Dative-Instrumental. The nouns of this declension end- 
ing in "a" are masculine, and those ending in "e" are 
feminine with the exception of two: "eage, " "eye," and 
"eare, " "ear," which are neuter. The forms of this 
declension persist in Modern English in a very few ex- 
amples, the clearest of which is "oxen," from the singular 
"ox," Old English "oxa." 

Another very interesting, though not numerous group 
of nouns, is that which includes the words which form their 
Genitive and Dative singular and their Nominative and 
Accusative plural by a vowel change instead of by an 
inflectional termination. Some of these words are familiar 
in Modern English, as "foot," "feet," "mouse," "mice," 
"man," "men," etc., and have been referred to in a pre- 
vious chapter in the discussion of the law of "Mutation," 
or "Umlaut." 

There are six other small groups of nouns which the 
grammarians count as separate declensions, because they 
show more or less important variations from these four 



68 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

types. They may be very briefly described as follows: 
1. Some traces of an "I" declension, almost all examples 
of which had, even in the Old English period, gone over 
to the "O" or the "A;" 2. The "U" declension, includ- 
ing the words "wudu, " "wood;" "duru, " "door," etc., 
with some others like "hond, " hand, in which the charac- 
teristic "u" does not appear. These form all the cases 
except Nominative singular and Dative-Instrumental plur- 
al in "a." 3. The "ND" Declensionf words like "fre- 
ond, " friend, and "feond, " enemy, which show some 
irregularities from the "O" type. 4. The Feminine Ab- 
stracts, like "strengu," "strength, " which show irregu- 
larities from the " A " type. 5. The " OS, " " ES, "Declen- 
sion, including a few neuters, for the most part names of 
young animals as "cealf, " "calf, " "lomb, " "lamb, " which 
have a letter "r " intruding before the inflectional termina- 
tions, which otherwise resemble those of the "O" type. 
The one of these which has persisted in Modern English is 
"cild, " "child," the name of the young human animal. 
In Old English its plural was "cildru," the "r" of which 
remains in our word "children," though a curious freak 
of language has substituted the "en" of the Weak "N" 
declension for the "u" which the word had in its Old Eng- 
lish form. 6. Finally we have a small group of very 
familiar words, expressions of close relationship: "faeder, " 
"father," "modor," "mother," "sweostor," "sister," 
which the grammarians put into an "R" declension and 
which follow the "O" and "A" with great irregularities. 
We surely have reason to be profoundly grateful to the 
"Genius" of the English language, whatever that fine 
phrase may stand for, because of the great simplification 
of this elaborate system of declensions. The few irregu- 
larities which remain are easily remembered, and no doubt 



THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 69 

many of them will pass out of use in the progress of time. 
One important feature of Old English which gave its 
writers a distinct advantage, however, grew out of this 
system of inflections ; namely, the greater liberty they en- 
joyed in the matter of the proper order of words. As the 
case form of the noun showed its grammatical relations, it 
was comparatively easy to make sentences as periodic as 
those of Caesar or Cicero; and the poets could make their 
alliterative lines with great facility. Notice the order of 
the words in the following lines from Caedmon's Genesis: 

3a 3aes rinces se rica ongan 

jCynjng costigan cunnode georne 

hwilc 3aes aej)elinges ellen w^aere 

stij)um wordum spraec him stefne to. 

Literally, translated- in to Modern English, but keeping 
the Old English order, the words would run as follows: 

Then of the warrior the mighty began 

King to examine would know exactly 

What the atheling's virtue might be; 

With strong words spoke him with voice to. " 

♦ 
The most striking illustration of the freedom of order 

is, of course, the place of the word "to" at the end of the 
last line. It is taken from its natural place before the 
word "him" which it governs, and for some metrical 
reason put at the end of the line; but is easily connected 
with the word it modifies because in Old English "him" is 
a distinct Dative form, not to be confused with the Accusa- 
tive "hine. " So in the first and second lines "mighty" 
and "king" are easily kept together and "king" is clearly 



70 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

seen to be the subject of "began," because of the inflec- 
tion which shows "cyning" to be a Nominative with "se 
rica" agreeing with it. Our modern liberty as to case 
forms is paid for by our limitations as to word order in 
sentence structure. 

Another characteristic of Old English grammar which 
we are glad to be rid of is the arbitrary grammatical gender. 
While it is interesting to speculate as to the origin of these 
distinctions, to wonder why the Teutonic people made 
the sun feminine and the moon masculine, to fancy a 
gleam of reason in the fact that "treow, " wood or tree is 
neuter, while "treow," "faith or truth," is feminine, we 
despair of any rational solution of a system which makes 
"wif, " "woman," and "maeden, " maiden," neuter 
nouns, "hond, " "hand," and "nosu, " "nose," feminine, 
and "fot," "foot," and "to3," "tooth," masculine. 
There seems to be nothing for the student of Old English, 
in this matter of gender, but to depend on his memory, 
and be thankful if he may be able to help himself a little 
by the analogy of modern German. 

In the pronoun we see the process of simplification re- 
lieving us of a complexity of forms even more trying to 
the patience than the noun declensions. Probably most 
students of Anglo-Saxon would agree that the toughest 
piece of memorizing they are called on to do is that of the 
two demonstrative pronouns. The full declension forms 
will be found in Part II. and may there be studied in 
detail; and it would be well for the student to have these 
forms before his eye, while we here proceed to consider 
some of the more important characteristics of these pro- 
nouns. "9es" stood for our modern word "this," and 
was elaborately declined in the three genders, five cases 
and two numbers. Of all these forms only the neuter 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 71 

Nominative-Accusative has been preserved, and with the 
help of prepositions made to do duty for all cases in the 
singular. The plural forms corresponding to the Old 
English forms of this pronoun in the Middle and Modern 
English periods will be considered in the chapters dealing 
with those periods; and here it will be sufficient simply to 
notice that this whole group of words has passed entirely 
out of use. So with the pronoun "se," corresponding to 
the modern demonstrative, "that," almost all the various 
forms have disappeared, the only ones remaining in use 
being the Nominative-Accusative neuter singular "3aet, " 
which, like "3is, " in a slightly changed modern form, 
has been made to do duty for all the other forms of the 
singular as well as a variety of other more properly rela- 
tive and conjunctive functions. It has become one of the 
most useful and hardest worked little words in the lan- 
guage. Of the pluraLforms of this pronoun the only one 
that remains substantially unchanged in modern usage 
is "3aem, " the Dative-Instrumental; but Etymologists 
are not all agreed in identifying "them" with this word, 
as there seems to be good reason for connecting "them" 
with the Norse forms "they" and "their." This matter, 
however, will also come up for consideration in later 
chapters. The feminine Nominative singular of "se," 
the w r ord "seo, " is the most probable ancestor of the 
feminine personal pronoun "she," as that word cannot 
be derived from any form of the Old English personal pro- 
noun. The Instrumental case of "se," the form "3y, " 
appears, some scholars say, in the idiomatic phrase, "the 
more the better, " and similar locutions, the etymological 
meaning of which would then be "by this more, by this 
better," or "by so much as it is more, by so much is it 
better." The various forms of these pronouns were used 



72 THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 

in Old English where Modern English uses the Definite 
Article; but the word "the" can not be clearly derived 
from any of these demonstrative forms. This subject also 
will be discussed, in another connection, but it may be 
noted here that the Definite Article probably must be 
connected with the word "3e," which in Old English was 
very largely used, being in fact one of the most hard worked 
words in the language; but generally as a relative, very 
much as Modern English uses "that." There are some 
connections, however, more frequent in later than in 
earlier writings, in which this word may be given a sense 
identical with the definite Article; at least so say some of 
the students of the subject. This explanation is supported 
by the fact that we do not find "se" or "seo" used as 
Definite Article in any of the transitional writings; but 
do find "the" spelled with the Thorn letter, in Middle 
English, and even in the earlier Modern English writings, 
this spelling being the origin of the archaism "ye," re- 
ferred to above in the discussion of the Alphabet. 

In the personal pronoun, a peculiarity of Old English of 
special interest to students of Greek is the existence of a 
distinct dual form. This is found in the first person in 
the words "wit," "we two," "uncer," "of us two," 
"unc, " "to or for us two," and "uncit," or "unc," "us 
two" (accusative case). The corresponding forms for 
the second person are "git," "incer," "inc, " "incit." 
In this respect Old English has an instrument for more 
exact expression than is found in Modern English. The 
forms are freely used by Old English writers, though the 
occasions when they are called for do not seem to be very 
numerous; and this fact may account for their abandon- 
ment. Another striking characteristic of the Old English 
pronoun which has been lost in Modern English is the 



THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 73 

distinction between the Dative and the Accusative cases. 
It would be more accurate to say that for the old forms we 
have substituted prepositions to express the shades of 
meaning formerly given by the Dative and Instrumental 
cases. It is noteworthy that in all the three persons it is 
the Accusative forms "mec," "3ec," "hine," "usie," 
"eowic, " which have been lost while the Dative forms 
forms "me," "9e," "him," "us," "eow," have been 
preserved in more or less altered spelling, for our modern 
Objective case. In the third person, it is noticeable that 
Old English had a consistently declined series of forms 
corresponding to the Nominative singular masculine "he." 
Of these "he," "his," "him," remain in use; but all 
the other forms have been lost or altered. The neuter 
Nominative- Accusative was "hit" from which we have 
merely dropped the "h;" and the neuter Genitive was 
identical with the masculine "his," the word "its" 
coming into use first in modern times. Old English 
used also the form "him" for the Dative-Instrumental 
Neuter as well as for the masculine; so that in the case 
of the third person neuter singular it has been the Accusa- 
tive form, rather than the Dative, which has been pre- 
served for the modern Objective case. In the feminine 
we find "hire" as the form for the Genitive and Dative- 
Instrumental singular, and recognize in it though some- 
what altered our modern word "her;" but the Nominative 
and Accusative and all the plural forms for all genders 
have disappeared. Old English grammar keeps clear the 
distinction between singular and plural in the second 
person, the "you" and "your" of modern courteous 
language not appearing in the recorded speech of our 
English ancestors. It is to be noticed that "mln" and 
"3in," the old forms of our possessives "mine" and 



74 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"thine," were originally Genitive case forms of the pro- 
nouns, our shorter forms, "my" and "thy," having been 
introduced much later. We may also see the beginnings 
of the process of alteration which has given us many of 
our modern forms in the variants already in use in Old 
English, as "mec" or "me" in the Accusative singular, 
"user" or "ure" in the Genitive plural of the First Per- 
sonal Pronoun, and other such alternative forms. 

There were three interrogative pronouns: "hwilc, " 
"hwaeSer, " "hwa." The Scotchman will easily recog- 
nize in the first of these the older form of his familiar word 
"whilk, " but it seems much more remote from the Eng- 
lish "which." There are a great many instances in which 
this resemblance between Old English and the Lowland 
Scotch dialect will appear; for the peculiarities of that 
way of speaking are largely survivals of the Northumbrian 
dialect of Old English. "HwaeSer" is plainly the same 
word as modern "whether." It had in Old English the 
sense "which of two?" a dual interrogative, a shade of 
meaning which is found in the English Bible, King James 
Version, in the question, "Whether of them twain did the 
will of his father?" "Hwa," the Old English "who," 
was declined in the Masculine and Neuter Singular, with 
no Feminine or Plural forms. In all these words the 
superior rationality of Old English spelling appears in the 
fact that the "H" precedes the "W" in the spelling as it 
certainly does in the correct pronunciation. The Genitive 
"hwaes" and the Dative "hwam" correspond clearly to 
modern "whose" and "whom," and in this instance 
again it is the Dative form which has been preserved for 
the modern Objective, Old English "hwone" of the Accusa- 
tive having disappeared. The Instrumental case of this 
word, "hwy," remains in use as the adverbial conjunction 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 75 

"why." The neuter Nominative- Accusative, "hwaet," 
is to be recognized without much difficulty in modern 
"what," but was used in Old English strictly as a neuter, 
or as an Interjection in the sense of "Lo!" or "Behold!" 
Compare the opening line of Beowulf: 

"Hwaet! we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum." 

These interrogatives were not employed in Old English 
as they are in Modern, to do the work of Relatives. Old 
English, like Modern, had no true Relative Pronouns; but 
it used for this function the various forms of the Demon- 
stratives, and particularly worked very hard the little 
particle "t>e, " which has already been referred to as the 
possible ancestor of the definite Article "the." This little 
word did duty in Old English for purposes of relative 
construction very much as "that" does in Modern Eng- 
lish. "Hwilc" was not limited to the neuter as we limit 
relative "which" in modern usage. 'Indeed that limita- 
tion is later than Shakespeare and the King James Bible, 
as we constantly see illustrated in the opening words of 
the Lord's Prayer: 

"Our Father which art in Heaven." 

Old English made the same use of Interrogatives and 
Adjectives as Indefinite pronouns with which we are 
familiar in modern usage. It is not- always easy to dis- 
tinguish this use from that of the same words as Relatives . 
Thus Shakespeare's phrase, "Who steals my purse steals 
trash," might be cited as the use of the Interrogative 
"who" as an Indefinite; but might as reasonably be ex- 
plained as the use of "who" relatively with the antecedent 



76 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"he" understood. There were three words, however, 
in Old English, used so constantly and clearly as Indef- 
inites that they may be safely so classified. These are: 
"sum," a certain one or one of a number; "an," one 
where the idea of a single individual is emphasized; and 
"man" having the same sense as the corresponding word 
in Modern German. "An" remains in Modern English in 
two forms: the Numeral and Indefinite pronoun "one," 
and the Indefinite Article "an," which becomes "a" 
before words beginning with a consonant. Old High 
German, as well as Old English had the Indefinite "man;" 
and as already noticed Modern German has retained it as 
a very useful part of its vocabulary while Modern English 
has unfortunately lost it. 

The Old English Adjective had not only a full declen- 
sion scheme for both numbers and all three genders, but 
also a double form, like that of Modern German, known 
as the "Weak" and the "Strong" declensions. When 
it was used in the attributive relation, after a pronoun, or 
was otherwise distinctly definite, it had the Weak declen- 
sion, like that of the "Weak" N nouns, using generally the 
letter "N" for the case forms. In other relations, when 
indefinite, or in the predicate, as in the sentence "the 
wind was strong," it had the "Strong" declension, closely 
resembling that of the Pronoun. The Adjective "olden, " 
as used in the phrase "the olden time," may possibly be 
a survival of the "Weak" declension of the Adjective; 
but as there is a group of adjectives formed from nouns by 
the addition of the suffix "en," as "golden," "brazen," 
"silken," etc., the form "olden," may be explained by 
the analogy or attraction of these forms. In the matter 
of comparison the chief differences between Old and 
Modern English are the appearance of the "Umlaut" 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 77 

or "Mutation" in Old English, and the use of the auxili- 
aries "more" and "most," instead of the Comparative 
and Superlative forms, in Modern English. In Old Eng- 
lish an example of the regular comparison is as follows: 
Positive, "strang;" Comparative "strengra;" Superla- 
tive, "strengest. " As in so many other instances this 
umlauted form has disappeared in the general tendency 
to simplification in Modern English; but it was usual in 
Old English, representing the older form "ira, " "ista," 
the "I" of which palatalized the preceding accented vowel. 
The more familiar Adjectives, for example, "yfel, " evil 
or bad; "god," good, were irregularly compared as they 
are in Modern English. Adverbs did not use the auxilia- 
ries "more" and "most," or any equivalents for them; 
but were regularly compared with the terminations "or," 
"ost, " as "georne, " "geornor, " "geornost, " eagerly, 
more eagerly, most eagerly. 

The Numerals were often treated as Nouns, being fol- 
lowed by the name of the thing or things modified, in the 
Genitive plural; as "hund horsa, " literally rendered, "a 
hundred of horses." The first three cardinals "an," 
"twa," "9reo," were declined like Pronouns, though 
with some irregularities; but the rest were generally inde- 
clinable. There were two words for "ten:" "tene," 
which was used in the compounds "Sreotiene, " "feo- 
wertiene," etc., and "tig," which had more exactly the 
meaning "a ten," or a decade, and was therefore used in 
the compounds " twentig, " " 3rittig, " " f eowertig, " 
meaning precisely, "Two tens," "Three tens," "Four 
tens." A peculiar feature of the Old English numeral 
system was the use of the prefix "hund" before all 
numbers from seventy to one hundred and twenty. 
Thus " hundeahtatig " was eighty, " hund-teontig, " or 



78 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"hund-ten tens," was an expression for one hundred, 
and the oldest expression for one hundred and twenty was 
" hund-twelf tig, " literally "hund-twelve tens," in all of 
which the numerical expression seems to be quite com- 
plete without the "hund." This evident uselessness of 
the prefix led to its elimination in most of its uses, even 
during the Old English period, and later it came to be 
used alone for the number one hundred. The ordinals 
corresponding to cardinal "an" were "forma," "fyrest," 
and "aerest, " the latter a superlative form of the adjec- 
tive "aer," meaning early. "Forma" remains in Modern 
English in the curious double superlative, foremost, which 
really means "most first." "Fyrest" is easily recog- 
nized in modern "first," and "aerest" remains in the 
archaic "erst," as its positive is found in modern "ere." 
There was no proper ordinal corresponding to "twa;" but 
instead Old English used "o9er," and "aefterra." The 
normal termination of the Old English Ordinal was "da," 
"ta, " or "3a," and we have accordingly "Sridda, " 
"feor3a," "fifta," "siexta," etc. After "siexta," the 
large majority of the ordinals have the "9a" termination, 
from which comes the "th" in "eighth, " "ninth, " "tenth" 
and the rest. 

The prepositions and conjunctions are with very few 
exceptions of Old English origin, and for the most part 
have retained substantially the old forms and uses. There 
are, however, a few interesting differences between the 
old and the recent usage. One of these is in the word 
"wij)," which in Old English meant "against." This 
meaning persists in a few compounds, such as "withhold," 
and "withstand," meaning etymologically "to hold 
against, or to stand against." The idea of modern 
"with," was expressed in Old English by "mid," a word 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 79 

from a root cognate with that of the German "mit." 
Old English "ongean," "in front of" or "opposite," is 
the root of modern "against," whichh as taken the place 
of old "wij)." Old English had also the two words 
"ac," meaning "but," and "butan," meaning "with- 
out" or "except." The history of these is like that of 
the previous pair; "ac" has been lost, and "butan," 
modern "but," takes its place; while the specific function 
of old "butan" has been turned over to a word of French 
derivation, ' ' except . ' ' 

The particle of affirmation in Old English was "gea," 
almost precisely our modern "yea." "Yes" seems to have 
come from a more emphatic phrase, "gea swa," "yea 
so," or "yea indeed." The common negative was "ne," 
used in the sense of "nor" as late as the time of the 
Poet Surrey. "Ne" could easily be combined with verbal 
forms and frequently was so combined, giving such forms 
as "naes," was not, from "ne" and "waes." "Na," 
and "nan" were also frequently used for "no" and 
"none." Old English made an emphatic negative by 
repetition; and the rules of syntax seem to have put no 
limit to this process. A sentence from Alfred's translation 
of the story of Orpheus, telling the effect of his music in 
Hades, will illustrate the extent to which this repetition 
of the negative might be carried: "Nan heort ne onscunode 
naenne leon, ne nan hara naenne hund, ne nan neat nyste 
naSnne andan;" which literally translated would run thus: 
"No hart feared not no lion, nor no hare no hound, nor 
no cattle knew not no terror." This was correct English 
in its time and certainly puts great emphasis on the nega- 
tive idea. The double negative persisted in good English 
usage through the Middle English period and into the 
Modern; and we probably owe its entire elimination to 
the writers of the eighteenth century. 



80 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

The Verb may be called the working man of the vocabu- 
lary, and in these most hard worked words we are likely 
to find some of the most interesting and important changes. 
The verbs, even more than other words, reflect the changes 
in the customs, the education, the religion, the political 
institutions, above all in the Literature of a people. We 
may see the whole life of a nation implied in the words by 
which their action is spoken or written; and of course this 
function of telling the action of a people is discharged 
mainly by the verbs. We see then why the Latin term 
"verbum, " "word," is appropriated to this special class 
of words. Nouns, the names of things or persons; Pro- 
nouns which merely stand for other words; Adjectives and 
Adverbs which name qualities and are therefore mere 
attendants upon other words; Prepositions, Conjunctions, 
Particles, which, so to speak, merely fill in the chinks of 
speech; these are not words in the same sense as the verbs 
which tell what we think, feel and do. We are coming to 
the very heart of our subject when we study the little 
symbols of ideas which carry in them the loves, hatreds, 
hopes, despairs, joys, sorrows, losses, gains, failures, suc- 
cesses of mankind. If any part of our subject can be 
rescued from the traditional dryness of grammar and 
philology, it surely ought to be this. 

There are some characteristics of the Teutonic verb 
system in general, which should be considered briefly 
before we enter on the detailed study of the Old English 
Verb. The Teutonic languages have a double system of 
Conjugation, inflecting certain verbs by what is called the 
"Strong" conjugation, and certain others by what is 
called the "Weak." The Strong verbs form their Pret- 
erite tense and their Past Participle by a vowel change, 
as in the verb "sing," "sang," "sung;" the Weak by add- 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 81 

ingtothe stem the letters "d," "ed," "de," "t," "te," as 
in the verbs "love," "loved," "loved;" "sleep," "slept," 
"slept." Again, the Teutonic verbs are distinguished by 
their comparatively few and simple inflectional forms. For 
example, there are in English really only two tenses, the 
Present and the Past; such ideas as are expressed in other 
languages by the forms of the Future, Imperfect, Aorist, 
Pluperfect, and other tenses, being left, in Old English to 
be inferred from the context, and in modern English ex- 
pressed by the use of auxiliaries, "have," "had," "shall," 
"will," etc. Modern English grammars make a show of 
elaborate tense formations through these auxiliaries; but 
they are not inflected forms; not real tense forms of the 
verb. So it is characteristic of the Teutonic verb not to 
mark the Passive voice by any real inflectional change. 
For the Active we say "he loved;" for the Passive "he 
was loved;" which again is the expression of the idea by 
use of an auxiliary, not a true inflected Passive voice form. 
There is just one example of a true passive in English; the 
existence of which may indicate that at some remote 
period the language was in this respect like the other Indo- 
European tongues, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. In Old 
English the verb "hatan, " to call or name, had a passive 
form "hatte," plural "hatton, " meaning was or were 
called. A much changed form of this occurs in early 
Modern English Literature; as in Surrey's phrase "and 
Geraldine she hight, " where "hight" is clearly a passive 
form meaning "was called," and is the survival of Old 
English "hatte." So again English, with the Teutonic 
languages in general, makes one form serve for the Opta- 
tive and the Subjunctive Modes. Whether the idea is 
one of wish, or conditional action, must be determined in 
Old English by the connection; and a careful study of the 



82 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

best modern usage shows clearly that the Subjunctive as 
a distinct inflected form, is disappearing from the lan- 
guage. The English mind seems to prefer to express such 
ideas by a combination with auxiliaries rather than by 
inflection; and the purists who struggle to preserve the 
true Subjunctive, insisting upon "if I be," and "if I 
were," instead of "if I am," and "if I was," are fighting 
a losing battle, because they have against them a race 
tendency, not simply English, but Teutonic. 

In spite of this fundamental simplicity of the Teutonic 
verb, when we come to compare the Old English with the 
modern forms we get the impression of a complicated 
system of complicated conjugations. Something of this 
is due to a needless multiplication of Conjugations by the 
grammarians, in their zeal to provide accurate scientific 
classifications for all the variations; a work which the 
simplifying tendency of the language has been steadily 
undoing for a thousand years ; but, as in the case of nouns 
and pronouns, Old English did by inflection a great deal 
of that work of expression for which we now depend upon 
auxiliaries and prepositions. Modern English grammar 
is the result of the working of the tendencies to change, 
upon the material of the Old English words and forms; 
and therefore, for anything like a clear understanding of 
modern usage, we must have some acquaintance with the 
main lines, at least, of the old grammatical system. 

The "strong" verbs were divided into two classes: the 
"Ablaut, " or " Gradation " Series, referred to in a previous 
chapter; and the "Reduplicating" verbs, in which the 
characteristic vowel change is accompanied and condi- 
tioned by a reduplication of the initial consonant, a mode 
of inflection familiar to those who have studied the Greek 
grammar. Six Series of "Ablaut" or "Gradation" verbs 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 83 

are distinguished by the Sievers-Cook Grammar, and may 
be studied in detail in the Second Part. Forms corre- 
sponding to most, if not all of these, may be found in 
Modern English usage, though the tendency to levelling 
of forms has carried'a large number of the verbs over from 
the "strong" to the "weak" conjugation. The principal 
parts, in which the series of vowel changes appeared were : 
1. the Present Infinitive, 2. the Preterite Indicative 
Singular, 3. the Preterite Indicative Plural and 4. the 
Past Participle. As: 

Pres. Inf. risan Pret. Sing, ras, Pret. plu. rison 

Part, risen. 

This is easily seen to be the same form substantially as 
our modern "rise," "rose," "risen," In many of the 
verbs, however, which iave, in general, retained the Ab- 
laut system of conjugation, there have been interesting 
and important changes which will be considered when we 
study the Middle and Modern periods of the language 
history. The distinct form for the Plural Preterite may 
be noticed here, as the occasion for the uncertainties and 
frequent solecisms in Modern usage as between the vowels 
"A" and "U," in the Preterites and Past Participles of 
these verbs. In the "Reduplicating" verbs the process 
of formation is veiled, even in Old English, by the phono- 
logical changes which took place after the "Reduplica- 
tion." There were two distinct classes of these verbs: 
1. those which had their Preterite in "eo, " as "cnawan, " 
"cneow;" Modern "know," "knew;" and 2. those which 
formed their Preterite in "e"; as "hatan" "het, " mean- 
ing "call," "called." This word, which gave us our 
one clear example of a true Passive form in English, is also 



84 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

of special interest as the one word which reveals to the 
naked eye, so to speak, the process of " Reduplication, " 
in Old English. It had, beside the Preterite form "het," 
given above, another, "heht," not so often used, in which 
the reduplicated "H" is clearly visible. A process of 
contraction very often seen in Old English is that by 
which a medial "H," like this, is dropped. ("H" is a 
notoriously weak consonant, constantly being pushed out 
of the way or absorbed by its stronger mates.) One 
effect of this dropping of the medial "H," is the lengthen- 
ing of the preceding vowel, or its blending with the follow- 
ing vowel, when there is one, to produce either the long 
"e," or the "eo" of the other class. Some such process 
as this, working slightly different results with different 
consonants accounts for the forms of the verbs called 
"Reduplicating. " 

The "Weak" verbs also were much more complex than 
what are known as the "Regular" verbs of Modern Eng- 
lish. There were three classes, showing distinct differ- 
ences in conjugation; differences which have almost all 
disappeared in the later development of the language, 
but which must be known and considered if we are to 
understand that development. The characteristic pecul- 
iarity of the "Weak" verbs is, as already noticed, that 
they form their Preterite and Past Participle by the addi- 
tion to the stem, of the letters "d," "ed," "de," "t," 
"te." Whether the consonant shall be "D" or "T," is 
determined by the nature of the consonant preceding; if 
that is one of the "voiceless" or "surd" letters, "C," 
"F," "P," "S," "T," the consonant of the Preterite will 
be also a voiceless letter, that is "T;" but if the consonant 
of the preceding syllable is a voiced letter, or a sonant, 
"B," "D," "G," "V," "Z," then the consonant of the 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 85 

Preterite will be also a voiced letter, that is, "D." Thus 
"cyssan," "cyste;"but "secgan," "saegde." In many 
cases, however, a vowel, ("E, " in the first class, and "A" 
or "O," in the second class), is inserted between the two 
consonants, in which event the consonant of the Preterite 
ending is regularly "D." Thus "fremman, " to perform; 
Preterite "fremede;" "lufian," to love, Preterite "lu- 
fode. " Many of the verbs now counted among the 
"Weak" or "Regular" verbs of our modern grammar, 
were originally "Strong" verbs; and the persistence of 
some of these strong Preterites among the uneducated 
who do not feel the influence of literary usage accounts 
for many of the solecisms such as "drug" for "dragged," 
and "dumb," for "climbed." In this latter instance 
the use must still be counted as divided. Lowell cites 
"dumb" as a Yankee dialectal solecism; but Milton< 
Wordsworth and Tennyson all use "clomb." The form 
"clomb" must be recognized as persisting in the language 
of Poetry, while "climbed," the weak form, has estab- 
lished itself in the language of Prose and of ordinary 
conversation. 

A small group of verbs of somewhat peculiar interest is 
that called by some authorities " Strong- Weak " verbs, 
and by others "Preteritive Presents." The latter term 
suggests the characteristic fact that they have for the 
Present Indicative a form closely resembling a "Strong" 
Preterite; and the former arises from the further fact that 
they form their Preterite upon the stem, according to 
the method of the "Weak" conjugations. Examples are 
found corresponding in their Preteritive Presents to all 
six of the classes of the "Ablaut" series. One of these 
verbs is "witan, " to know, whose Present Indicative 
was "wat, " like the Preterite of the First Ablaut class; 



86 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and whose Preterite was "wiste, " formed according to 
the analogy of the First class of "Weak" verbs. Both 
of these forms are found repeatedly in the Elizabethan 
Literature, and occur in the King James Bible; as "We 
wot not what is become of him;" and "Wist ye not that 
I must be about my Father's business." 

In the formation of Mode, Person, Number, etc., the 
striking difference in the methods of Old English, as com- 
pared with Modern, is in the use of inflections rather than 
auxiliaries and pronouns. Thus in the Present Indica- 
tive, the second person singular was expressed by the 
termination "st," and the third person by "th;" ter- 
minations which are sufficiently familiar still in the lan- 
guage of poetry and prayer, but have disappeared from the 
language of ordinary prose and conversation. Even in 
such modern use, however, the pronouns "thou" and 
"he" must be generally used, while in Old English this 
was not necessary. The present plural, in all three per- 
sons, was "a9, " and the Preterite plural was "on," both 
which forms have been lost. Another interesting form in 
the Old English verb inflection, was the prefix "ge" in 
the Past Participle, familiar to students of German, which 
even in Old English was very often omitted, which is 
found in Middle English in the form "y, " as "yclept," 
"named," and which modern usage has eliminated en- 
tirely. 

The verbs which in Old English are known as irregular 
or anomalous are those whose forms cannot be classified 
with any of the varied conjugations described as "Ab- 
laut," "Reduplicating," "Weak," or "Preteritive Pres- 
ent;" which generally use more than one root in the 
formation of tense and mode, that is, are really combina- 
tions of different verbs, one root being used for some 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 87 

forms, another, for other forms, and so on. The sub- 
stantive verb "to be," is thus irregular in many if not in 
all languages. The Sievers-Cook Grammar of Old Eng- 
lish, in its last edition, gives four roots for this verb, as 
follows: 1. "es, " from which are derived "eom," "am," 
"is," and the plural and optative forms, "sint, " and 
'sie," which have been lost from Modern English, but 
whose cognates may be seen in Modern German. 2. 
"er," "or," from which come "eart," "art," and 
"earun," "aron," "are." 3. "bheu," from which 
come "beo," "beon," "be," "been," "being," and the 
obsolete "bist, " "bi9," which also have their cognates 
in German. 4. "wes," from which come "waes," 
"was," "waere," "were," with "wesan," and other 
forms also lost to Modern English, but to be seen in cog- 
nate words such as "gewesen, " in German. 

Corresponding to our modern word "go," with its ir- 
regular Preterite, "went," were three words in Old Eng- 
lish: "gan," "gongan, " and "wendan." Of these, 
"gan" was irregular, having for its Preterite the word 
"eode," evidently from another root. "Gongan" was a 
Reduplicating verb with its Preterite, "geong;" and 
"wendan" was a "Weak" verb with its Preterite "wen- 
de," "wendon." The changes in these forms in Middle 
and Modern English will be considered under those peri- 
ods; but it may be noticed here that for our modern 
Preterite of "go" we have dropped the old Preterite 
"eode," which persisted in Middle English in the form 
"yede, " have passed over the forms of "gongan," and 
have transferred to "go" the Preterite of "wendan," 
in modern "went," keeping, however the verb "wendan," 
in modern "wend," with a slightly changed form and 
meaning, and made a new "Weak" Preterite for this 



88 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

adaptation of the old verb, "wended." There could 
scarcely be a better illustration of the complicated and 
delicate work of elimination, choice, adaptation and altera- 
tion effected by the unconscious processes of grammatical 
development. 

The verb "don," "do," had in Old English the Pre- 
terite "dyde, " formed according to the analogy of the 
"Weak" verbs, and the Past Participle "gedon," which 
is as clearly a "Strong" form; these all corresponding 
closely to, modern "do," "did," "done." 

"Willan," "to will," had its Preterite in the "Weak" 
form, "wolde, " and had no Past Participle. It was 
regularly used to express purpose. "Sculan," "shall," 
was a Preteritive Present verb, its Present Indicative 
form "sceal, " corresponding to the Second class of the 
"Ablauts," and its Preterite, "scolde, " being as clearly 
"Weak." It was regularly used to express the idea of 
obligation; and the Old English writer held these words 
"willan" and "sculan" strictly to these meanings. The 
simple future he usually expressed by the forms of the 
present, leaving the reader to gather the idea of the future 
from the context. 



CHAPTER VI 

Period of Middle English, 1100-11^00. General 
Historical Conditions. 

THE Norsemen or Scandinavians were closely 
related to the English, and at all periods have 
strongly influenced their speech. Much more 
important, however, than the direct Norse 
influence, and the matter of greatest consequence in the 
Middle English period, is the part which the descendants 
of the Norsemen played in bringing the Latin French 
influence to bear upon English life and language. The 
Norsemen were even more daring voyagers and fighters 
than the early English. They sailed around the coast of 
Norway up into the Arctic Sea, in the Tenth century, 
one of the most interesting bits of Old English prose being 
the account which King Alfred gives us of the story told 
him by one of these early Norse voyagers about his sailing 
around the northern coast of Norway. These early Norse- 
men settled Iceland and visited Greenland; and there is 
gfcod reason to believe that they saw the coast of North 
America, centuries before Columbus discovered the West 
India Islands. More to our present purpose, however, 
is the fact that these Norsemen visited southern Europe 
and settled in Sicily and France. Those who established 
themselves in France founded the Dukedom of Normandy, 
and became a rich, powerful, progressive, civilized Chris- 
tian nation. Unlike the English, they took the language 
of the people they conquered, of course modifying it 

89 



90 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

somewhat by the introduction of their own words and 
forms, yet speaking and writing a language that was not 
in any sense Norse, but Norman French. French, as we 
have seen, is one of the divisions of the Italic Branch, 
growing out of the Vulgar or popular Latin, mingled with 
the Celtic of the original inhabitants of Gaul, and the 
Teutonic of the Frankish tribes who came into the country 
after the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus there were 
elements of affinity between this Norman French and 
English which made it quite natural that they should 
mingle when they came into mutual relations. 

During the later years of the Old English period, there 
was a good deal of contact between the two nations. It 
was not a long voyage across the channel from Normandy 
to England; and there was a considerable amount of 
travel back and forth, especially among the clergy and 
the royal and ducal families. Normandy was in advance 
of England in scholarship and art; and the later English 
Kings of the period were inclined to favor the introduction 
into England of Norman culture and Norman fashions. 
There was also more or less intermarriage between the 
families of the Kings of England and the Dukes of Nor- 
mandy. Especially during the reign of Edward the Con- 
fessor, was Norman French the fashion in England. 
Edward gave important positions in the Church anti 
about the Court to Normans; he read Norman writings 
and helped to make them widely known among the few 
English who could read. In these ways, through the 
inherent elements of affinity, the original racial kinship, 
the previous associations, the Normans found England 
ready for them in 1066, so that the English language, with 
comparative ease, received Norman ideas and Norman 
words when the English people submitted to Norman 
Kings. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 91 

Throughout the early Middle English period there were 
two languages in England spoken side by side. The 
King, the Norman nobles, the higher ecclesiastics, spoke 
French; the laboring classes, the farmers, the old Saxon 
Franklins or Squires, the descendants of the old English 
Kings and Earls, the parish priests, in a word the great 
body of the population spoke English. French, however, 
was the language of the law courts; if an Englishman was 
tried for any offense against the laws it would be before a 
Norman Baron, and the trial would be carried on in the 
French language. French, moreover, was the language 
of the higher schools.^ When an Englishman went to the 
University, if he did not speak Latin he would have to 
speak French. He would hear French from the lips of 
his teachers; he would be made to feel, if he were not 
directly told, that English was a rude inferior sort of 
language, fit for laboring men but not fit for scholars. 
On the other hand English had the great advantage of 
being the home speech of the people. The Normans 
never came to England in multitudes as the English came 
to Britain; the Norman invasion was not a migration, 
and the English were not exterminated or crowded out of 
their homes as the British had been. They submitted 
without much resistance to be ruled by Norman kings; 
but they kept their homes; they maintained their social 
customs; they forced the Normans to rule the country 
largely in accordance with English ideas. As time passed 
on there came to be intermarriages between English and 
Normans; and as these were generally of a Norman man 
with an English woman the language of the home re- 
mained English rather than French; for it is generally 
the mother rather than the father who determines the 
household speech. We speak of the Fatherland, but of 
the Mother tongue. 



92 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

When the Mississippi river is joined by the Missouri 
the two currents flow on together for miles without appar- 
ently mingling; you can see the big muddy stream of the 
Missouri clearly distinguished from the comparatively 
clear waters of the Mississippi. After a while, though 
nobody can tell just where and when the change takes 
place, the line between the two is lost, there is but one 
stream and it is the Mississippi. It was like this with the 
two languages. For many years they flowed on side by 
side, apparently not mingling; yet all the time that they 
appear superficially so distinct, under the surface they 
were blending. We cannot point out time and place for 
the actual unifying of the two forms of speech; but when 
we read the works of Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower, we 
find that there is one language; and though greatly changed 
from the language of King Alfred's day it is still unmis- 
takably English, not in any true sense of the word French. 

It is difficult to trace the process by which the English 
language was modified through its contact with the French 
in the Middle English period; but there are a few facts of 
importance which may be pointed out as illustrating the 
change which was going on. In the year 1204, in the 
reign of John, Normandy was separated from England, 
as a part of the historical movement by which the King- 
dom of France was being built up largely at the expense 
of the French dominions of the Kings of England. Since 
the accession of Henry the Second, Angevin, rather than 
Norman had been the title of the Kings, and of the French 
language which they spoke. It was a century later and 
more when Chaucer laughs at the language of the Prioress, 
remarking that she spoke French: 

"of the scole of Stratford atte Bo we 
For French of Paris was to hir unknowe;" 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 93 

the significance of which from our point of view is that 
Chaucer evidently thought of French as a foreign lan- 
guage, the standard form of which was Parisian rather than 
Norman. After John's failure to hold on to his French 
dominions it became more and more impossible to use 
the French language for official purposes in England. 
The monarch, from this time on, became primarily Eng- 
lish, his French affiliations becoming more and more 
secondary. A recent historical study of the career of 
Joan of Arc makes a plausible argument to the effect that 
if her movement for the liberation of France from English 
domination had failed, it is not at all impossible that 
France might have been completely absorbed in Eng- 
land. If this had been the political outcome of the long 
struggle of the Kings of England to retain and extend 
their dominions in France, we might have had to study an 
extension of the English language till it embraced the 
people of France accompanied by such a modification 
through French influence as would have resulted in a 
French-English speech very different from either modern 
English or modern French. Not to go any further with 
this sort of speculation, and returning to the study of the 
historical facts which are undoubtedly significant for the 
development of the language, the next thing that comes 
to notice is the issue by Henry, the Third, in 1258, of an 
official proclamation in three languages: English for 
popular use, French for the Court officials and the Norman 
aristocracy, and Latin for permanent record. 

This official use of English by a Norman King marks a 
very important epoch in the history of the language, sug- 
gesting that after one hundred and fifty years of the exist- 
ence of the two languages side by side, it is now settled 
that English is to remain at least a co-ordinate form of 



94 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

speech for official purposes, and is not at any rate, to be 
ignored by the rulers of the land. A study of this proc- 
lamation shows that the English thus recognized as the 
national tongue is essentially the same as Old English, a 
pure Teutonic speech with only a slight admixture of 
Latin or French elements. About a hundred years passed, 
French words, phrases and sounds working their way into 
English, and the English thus modified working its way 
into the use of the ruling classes of society; and then in 
the years 136£ and 1385 occurred two events of capital 
significance. At the earlier of these two dates Edward 
III. established the use of English in the courts of law, so 
that thenceforth the Englishman accused of crime must 
be tried by those who could understand and speak his 
language. If the Norman Squire would continue to dis- 
charge the duties of the "Justice of the Peace," associated 
with his rank, he must learn English. At the later of the 
two dates, 1385, under Richard II., English was made the 
official language of the Universities, so that the education 
of the country was thenceforth to be no longer exclusively 
French. The learned men, when they did not lecture in 
Latin, might use English; the Englishman need no longer 
feel that to speak his own language was a sign of rudeness; 
that to appear as a scholar he must use French. Thus, 
socially, English, at the end of about three hundred years, 
had held its own, and to a great degree won over to itself 
the classes that formerly spoke French. Of course it had 
been greatly changed in the process, though the most 
important features of the change were in the line of its 
natural development; and while it had adopted many 
French words and forms it was still essentially English. 

A glance at the literary history of the time is necessary 
to give anything like an adequate idea of this language 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 95 

movement. During the years immediately following the 
Norman conquest there was little important writing in 
English. Indeed, for two hundred years before this, dur- 
ing the West Saxon period of Old English, the literary 
spirit was not very strong; for while a good deal of writing 
was done it was not to any considerable degree original or 
creative. Alfred the Great and his contemporaries and 
successors for two hundred years wrote mostly translations 
or homilies and saints' lives, which were little more than 
compilations, or paraphrases from the Scriptures or from 
late Latin writers. French poetry and romance consti- 
tuted the bulk of the current literature of the first two 
centuries after the Norman conquest. English, however, 
did not die. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was kept up; 
and during the period from 1200 to 1350 appeared, among 
other works, the Ormulum, a metrical paraphrase of parts 
of the Bible; Layamon's "Brut," a long versified work in 
Epic form, giving the legends of Arthur, and other legend- 
ary stories connected with early British history, containing 
among others a very early form of the story of Lear and 
his daughters; the "Ancren Riwle," or "Rule for An- 
chorites," and the "Ayenbite of Inwit," or "Prick of 
Conscience," devotional works written by ecclesiastics 
especially for the use of monks and nuns; and the "Owl 
and Nightingale, " a poem attributed to a certain Nicholas 
de Guildford. These, with the other similar productions 
of the time, are of no great value as pure literature; but 
they are very important for the language history as tracing 
the progress of the movement which made our modern 
English through the thirteenth and the first half of the 
fourteenth centuries. Study of them shows that the same 
process we noted in the social and political language was 
going on in the literary tongue. French ideas of verse 



96 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and poetical expression, with French words and phrases, 
are working their way into English; but English absorbs 
them and remains English, while this literature written in 
English is gradually, even among the ruling classes, taking 
the place of that written in French. When we come to 
the end of the Middle English period and read the works 
of Chaucer, the Vision of "Piers Ploughman," Wyclif's 
Bible, and Gower's poems, we see the completion of this 
process. A brief comparison of "Piers Ploughman" with 
the writings of Chaucer would make the situation very 
plain. "Piers Ploughman" is a moral, allegorical poem, 
written by a man of the people for the common people. 
It is very strongly, aggressively, English, retaining the Old 
English strongly accented, alliterative verse and bristling 
with the homely expressions of everyday life. Yet to be 
intelligible to any readers of this time a writer is com- 
pelled to use a considerable number of words of French 
origin, and the fact is that this writer has nearly the same 
proportionate number of such words as other writers of 
the time* In Chaucer's works, on the other hand, we see 
the French influence at its height. He writes for the 
upper classes, addressing his poems sometimes to the Kings, 
and using the Death of Blanche, the Duchess of John of 
Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, as the subject of one of his 
most important poems. He ridicules the Old English 
alliterative verse, calling it the "rim ram ruff" style; 
though for his own artistic purposes he uses alliteration 
freely. He employs many French forms of versification 
and invents other forms of his own based upon the forms 
of the French poets. He takes much of his material from 
French and Italian sources, so that critics are accustomed 
to speak of clearly marked French and Italian periods in 
his poetic development. Naturally, then, the proportion 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 97 

of French words would be large; he would make free use 
of the French sounds of letters which had established 
themselves in the language and of French idioms and 
grammatical forms, so far as they had become English. 
All this is true; the proportion of French seems compara- 
tively large, and the French influence has to a great 
degree transformed the language. And yet, when we 
come to examine the diction carefully, there is not so 
much more of the French, in comparison with "Piers 
Ploughman," as one would expect. The language is still 
unquestionably English; so purely so as to deserve Spen- 
ser's praise: 

"Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled. " 

It is not French anglicized; it is English with a slight flavor 
of French. Moreover — and here is the important matter 
— this English of Chaucer is the unquestioned literary 
language of England; it is written for scholars and clergy- 
men, for lords and ladies, for Kings and Queens, as well as 
for the common people. 

In the Middle English period, four dialects are clearly 
to be distinguished, corresponding closely to the four dia- 
lects of Old English: "Kentish" is known by the same 
name as in the older time, but shows of course the charac- 
teristic changes of the period. The "Ayenbite of Inwit, " 
or "Prick of Conscience," a devotional work of about the 
year 1340, is the most important literary example of this 
dialect. Corresponding to the old "West-Saxon," is the 
"Southern," of which the "Ancren Riwle, " and the semi- 
historical writings of Robert of Gloucester are important 
examples. The successor of the old "Northumbrian" is 
called, in this period, the "Northern," the collection of old 



98 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

religious dramas called the "Townely Mysteries," being 
an important example. This dialect shows strong influ- 
ence from the Danish, but does not yield to the influence 
of French so much as do the others. Attention has been 
called to the fact that the Northumbrian country extended 
up into the southern part of what is now called Scotland, 
reaching from the Humber river on the south to the Forth, 
just north of Edinburgh. It is the Scotch part of the 
Northumbrians who have preserved the dialect in a form 
which has literary importance. In the latter part of the 
Middle English period the poets Barbour and Dunbar 
wrote in this dialect; and from their time until the time of 
Burns, and indeed until the work of the Scotch dialect 
writers of the present day, this Scotch form of the old 
Northern English has remained in use, a living language. 
Because of geographical and political associations we might 
be led to think of this dialect as kindred to the Highland 
Scotch; which would be a serious mistake. Highland 
Scotch is Celtic, while the speech of the Lowlands is very 
pure Teutonic, and gives us the closest existing resem- 
blance to Old English. In its Middle English form it was 
the direct successor of Northumbrian, the dialect in which 
English Literature was born. The "Midland" dialect 
corresponds to the "Mercian" of Old English, and is of the 
four dialects the one which most closely resembled Modern 
English, and which bears to it the most important linguis- 
tic relations. The reason for this is simple enough. Lon- 
don very early became the great political and social center 
of the English nation; and London, though it now lies on 
both sides of the river Thames, was originally built on the 
northern bank. A river boundary was in early days of 
far more importance than it is now; and it is probable that 
if London had been built on the south bank of the river, 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 99 

Modern English would have been much more like the 
language of Alfred the Great, and we should have gone to 
the West Saxon for the direct ancestors of our present 
literature. But Lon.don was a Midland city, and the 
speech of London was the Midland dialect. The great 
writers of the later Middle English period therefore natur- 
ally used this Midland speech; and thus it is the branch of 
Middle English from which has most directly grown the 
English we speak and write today. The "Ormulum" 
and Layamon's "Brut" are examples of this Midland 
dialect in its earlier period, about 1250; and the works of 
Chaucer and Wyclif show it in its later form, about 1380, 
when it comes nearest to modern forms and may fairly 
be called the language of England. 



CHAPTER VII 

Period of Middle English. The Vocabulary. 

IN the additions to the English vocabulary from 
Latin, Celtic and Scandinavian sources, it is difficult 
to distinguish with certainty the words which belong 
to this period from those which had already fixed 
themselves in general use during the centuries immediately 
preceding or from those which came into the language in 
the period immediately following. Probably many words 
of Latin derivation expressing governmental ideas belong 
to this time, which do not appear in Literature till later, 
as official documents were generally written in that lan- 
guage. Latin, during the middle ages, was the universal 
language of scholarship. Every educated man- must of 
course write and speak it; and the universities, as they 
developed in England, greatly extended its knowledge and 
use. The Bible, for the time, in England as in all western 
Europe, was the Latin Vulgate; and Wyclif's translation, 
made toward the end of the period, was marked by a large 
predominance of Latin forms and words of Latin deriva- 
tion. We may say then in general, that medieval English 
has for one of its characteristics a large addition of Latin 
words to the vocabulary, without regard to the words of 
ultimate Latin origin which came through French. 

The Celtic addition at this time is so small as to be 
practically negligible. The Celts remained in more or less 
close relations with the English, living in considerable 

100 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 101 

numbers in Wales, in the Highlands of Scotland and in 
Ireland; and in less numbers in the Isle of Man and in 
Cornwall; but a very few words, such as "clan," the 
Gaelic term for a political and social group bound together 
by common parentage, can be found as surely Celtic of 
this period; not enough to be of importance for their effect 
upon the language. 

There is such a close resemblance between Scandinavian 
forms and those of the Northern dialect of Middle English 
and the Northumbrian of Old English, that Philologists 
are often puzzled to distinguish between them, and can 
not always speak positively as to their exact derivation. 
Probably the most of the additions to English from this 
source belong to the time of the Danish invasions, in the 
Old English Period; such are "flag" and "leg" which may 
be suggestive of warlike marches and parades, "keg," 
which may remind us that the Dane, like the Englishman, 
dearly loved his beer; "dash" and "gnash," which also 
may reveal characteristic qualities and habits. The con- 
nection of the Danish element with Government, referred 
to in connection with the time when they were the rulers 
of England, is again suggested by the word "by-law," 
probably belonging to this time, whose original meaning 
seems to have been "town law," or local as distinguished 
from general law. Much the most important element of 
the borrowed vocabulary of this period is, of course, the 
French which for the most part is originally Latin, but 
contains also some Celtic, Norse and even Teutonic roots. 
It is common to use the word Norman for this element of 
the vocabulary, as if Norman and French were synonymous 
in this connection. This, however, is manifestly incorrect 
when we remember the facts already referred to as to the 
historical connection of England with other parts of France. 



102 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

It is clearly not historically true, as so often taken for 
granted, that the Norman conquerors forced or attempted 
to force their language upon the English. The exact 
opposite, though not true either, would be much nearer 
the facts. English did, in a sense, force itself upon the 
conquerors. In order to govern England successfully, 
they found it necessary to use the English language; and 
as they gradually became identified with their subjects in 
other respects, ceased to be French and grew to be English 
in ideas and customs, they gradually by an inevitable 
process, abandoned their ancestral tongue and took up 
the English which had become native to them, or rather 
to which they had become native; our language beginning 
thus that career of conquest and assimilation which it has 
followed through all the centuries since. To gain a clear 
notion of how far English had become colored by French 
in the course of this process it will be useful to note the 
words of French derivation in a passage from Chaucer, 
and then in one from Shakespeare. The passage from 
Chaucer is taken from the description of the Prioress in 
the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; the words of French 
derivation are italicized : 

"Ther was also a nonne, a Prior esse , 
That of hir smyling was ful simple and coy; 
Hir gretteste ooth was but by Seyint Loy; 
And she was cleped Madame Eglentyne. 
Ful wel she sung the servyce divyne, 
Entuned in hir nose ful semely ; 
And Fre.nsh she spak ful faire and fetisly, 
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, 
For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe. 
At mete wel y-taught was she withalle; 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 103 

She lete no morsel from hir lippes falle, 
Ne wette hir fingers in hir sauce depe. 
Wei coude she carie a morsel and wel kepe, 
That no drope ne fille upon hir brest. 
In curtesy e was set ful muche hir lest. " 

Seventeen words in these fifteen lines, or one hundred and 
fourteen words, that is, about fifteen per cent, are of French 
origin. 

The passage from Shakespeare is taken from the words 
of Oberon to Puck in the " Midsummer Night's Dream." 

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 
Where Oxlips and the nodding violet grows; 
Quite over canopied with luscious woodbine, 
With sweet musk roses and with eglantyne: 
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, 
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight; 
. And there the snake throws her enamelled skin, 
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in : 
And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes 
And make her full of hateful fantasies. 
Take thou some of it and seek through this grove, 
A sweet Athenian lady is in love 
With a disdainful youth; anoint his eyes; 
But do it when the next thing he espies 
May be the lady; thou shalt know the man 
By the Athenian garments he hath on." 

Of the one hundred and twenty-seven words in these six- 
teen lines twenty are of French origin; about the same 
proportion as in the lines from Chaucer. In both of these 
selections it happens that the percentage of French deriv- 



104 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

atives is rather above the average of the author's usage; 
but it is plain enough from them that, large as the French 
element is, it is not enough to make the language seem 
anything but genuine and substantially pure English; 
and the comparison of the two passages also makes it 
evident that in Chaucer we have come practically to the 
end of the process of transformation. The differences 
between his diction and that of Shakespeare are unes- 
sential. In Chaucer, as plainly as in Shakespeare, barring 
some slight matters of spelling, we are reading a bit of 
the English of Modern Literature. 

Out of the multitude of words of French origin which 
came in to English during the Middle period, a few may be 
selected which illustrate the known facts of history, and 
therefore go to show how the language development moved 
along in close relations with the political and social life 
of the times. That the French were the ruling class of 
society is a sufficiently familiar fact, but it may be made a 
more vivid fact if we recall that the words for the different 
orders of the Aristocracy, "Duke, " "Marquis," "Count- 
ess," "Viscount," "Baron," are French words. That 
the nation remained English, and that its English quality 
surely overcame and absorbed the French, socially and 
politically as well as linguistically, would appear from the 
facts that the names of the chief rulers, always nearer to 
the people than the Lords, remained English "King" and 
"Queen;" that English, also, is the name of the order 
next to the commonalty, the link between the people and 
the peerage, the "Knight;" and that the one order of the 
peerage whose name stood most definitely for real service, 
and which was an original English order, kept its English 
title "Earl," though his lady received the French title of 
"Countess." The governing function of the French is 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 105 

suggested, again, by the prevalence at this period of the 
words "prison," "court," "justice, " all words of French 
derivation. 

That mercantile life and the skilled occupations were in- 
vaded by the French would appear from the frequent use 
of the words "merchant," "carpenter," and "butcher," 
and the complete displacement of the corresponding 
words of English origin; while words connected with agri- 
cultural life remained largely English. That the wealth 
of England, and to a considerable extent, ownership of the 
land, passed into French hands is suggested by the French 
word "money" taking the place of Old English "mint," 
and by the current use of the French w r ords, "treasure" 
and "rent." That the French, having been victorious 
in war, remained the teachers and leaders of the nation in 
matters of warfare, appears in the fact that almost all 
military terms are of French origin. To this period belong 
the words "battle," "banner," "arms." That there 
was a social mingling of the French and English, leading 
to numerous inter-marriages would be reasonably inferred 
from the fact that while "father," "mother," "brother," 
"sister," pure English words, remain in use for the closest 
relationships, those a little more remote receive at this 
period new French names; as "aunt," "nephew," 
"niece," and "cousin." 

The revival of English Literature which took place in 
the later Middle English period, and which culminated in 
the work of Chaucer, was distinctly a French revival; that 
is, the main external influence perceptible in it was French, 
though as has been already suggested, Chaucer and Gower 
show- that they were acquainted with and made use of 
Italian Literature. While Chaucer's diction is a very pure 
English, the character of his words of French origin shows 



106 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the important part which French influences played in his 
education, and in his intellectual and artistic development; 
and in this respect Chaucer is doubtless typical of the 
intelligent people of his time. The names he uses for his 
metrical forms: "Ballade," " Compleynte, " "Envoy," as 
well as the titles he gives to some of his Poems, as "Leg- 
ende," "Parlement," and others, are largely French; and 
a marked thought movement, a great intellectual quicken- 
ing ministered by the French language, appears in such 
words as " curiositee, " " imaginacioun, " " inquisitif , " 
"permutacioun," "hemisphere," "philosophical," all of 
which are Chaucerian French. 

To the Middle English period belongs also the first large 
infusion into English of words of Arabic derivation. It 
has been pointed out already that the Arabs of the middle 
ages were in advance of Christian Europe in Science and in 
some of the Arts. Their Science may not have been of 
any great permanent value, since the true methods of 
successful scientific investigation were not understood; but 
it profoundly influenced the thinking of the time, and it 
left words which are still in use; many of them colored, to 
be sure, by the superstitions of Alchemy and Astrology. 
One quite simple and easy way to realize something of 
their influence upon European thought, and so upon our 
language with the other languages of Europe, is to look 
in any dictionary for the words beginning with the syllable 
"al." This is the Arabic definite article, and a number 
of the words beginning with these letters are Arabic words, 
and name objects or ideas which the Arabs gave to medie- 
val Europe. Some of the more familiar of these are 
"alchemy," "alkali," "almanac." Other words of 
Arabic origin, not so manifest because more altered by 
the other languages through which they have passed on 
their way to English, are "cotton" and "amber." 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 107 

Greek derivatives of all periods may be divided into 
two classes : those that have been taken from the original 
Greek writers directly, with slight changes of form, to 
express religious, philosophical, or scientific ideas; and 
those that have filtered into the language through other 
languages, notably Latin, and often have been so changed 
in the process that they are with difficulty recognized. 
The first of these classes may usually be known by their 
greater length, and by the use of double consonants to 
indicate some of the peculiar Greek consonants which 
occur in them; such as "ch" for Greek "Chi," "ph" for 
Greek "Phi," "ps" for Greek "Psi." These are generally 
words which have been coined to express the thoughts of 
students and investigators, and are frequent in Modern 
English. Some of them that came into use during the 
medieval period are "philosophy," "phantasie, " also 
spelled "fantasy," "cathedral," "demon," "prophet," 
"baptize." An interesting illustration of the other class, 
those that came into English through other languages and 
were greatly changed in the process is the word "Bishop. " 
From Greek Episcopos, by a regular vowel change in the 
transition between the two languages, came Latin Episco- 
pus.. The Old English cut off the initial "e" and the final 
"us," and altered the "p" to "b," making the word 
"Biscop," which is the usual Old English form. The 
general tendency of Middle English to soften the hard 
"c" gives us the modern word, which appears for the first 
time in Wyclif. Other words of this type which came 
from Greek into Middle English are "asylum," "comet,'' 
"coral," "govern," "ink," "opium." 



CHAPTER VIII 

Period of Middle English. Pronunciation and Grammar. 

SOME of the matters properly belonging to this 
Chapter have been necessarily anticipated in the 
study of the earlier period; and for the more de- 
tailed consideration of the grammar, one must go 
to the standard works on that subject. Reference to the 
Tables in Part II will give what is essential for the under- 
standing of the discussion to which we now proceed. 

It should be kept in mind that the changes evident in 
the Middle English period, in general grow out of the 
working of the two tendencies we have noted, all along, as 
conditioning the development of the English Language; 
namely, the tendency to level and simplify grammatical 
forms, and the tendency to seize upon and adapt to the 
uses of the language all available words, sounds and forms 
from other languages with which English is brought into 
close contact. The working of the latter tendency, has 
been discussed in the last chapter; and the same tendency 
shows itself very plainly in the changes in spelling and pro- 
nunciation. 

These are strongly conditioned by the influence of 
French, which, as we have seen, was brought into very 
close touch with English through the historical events and 
the social and political conditions of the centuries from 
Eleven Hundred to Fifteen Hundred. In the vowels the 
change appears mainly in the introduction of diphthongal 
combinations which were unknown to Old English, and 

108 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 109 

in the use of some French fashions of spelling and pro- 
nunciation. Thus the French "ou," in many words, 
takes the place of the simpler Old English "u": as, for 
example, Old English "tire," "ttin," "sctir," become 
Middle English "oure," "toun," "shoure." "Eu," in 
such words as "reule, " and "ew," in words like "newe," 
is thought to have had a sound closely resembling the New 
England dialectal "aouw," in words like "cow," "how," 
and so forth. "Ei," "ey," "ei," "ay," in such words 
as "feith," "wey," "gai," "lay," have the sound of 
the corresponding diphthongs in Modern English, in 
"feint," "they," "gait," "play." The letter "O" is 
made to take the place of "U" in a number of words like 
"above," "love," "wolf," the "U" sound being given 
to the "O" when thus used. A suggested explanation of 
this anomaly is the danger of confusion in the manuscripts 
between "U" and "N," which as there written looked 
very much alike. 

The changes in the use of the consonants are much more 
numerous and radical, as the French organs of speech re- 
volted very vigorously against the Old English gutturals 
and palatals. This, however, would not account for the 
first of these consonant changes to be noted, that is, the 
giving of the voiceless "S," sound to the letter "C" when 
used before "E," "I," or vowel " Y. " This seems rather 
to be the result of an effort to restrict "S" to the voiced 
or "Z" sound, an attempt which was not carried through 
at all consistently, and which led to the introduction or 
enlarged use of "K" and "Z," and to the permanent 
confusion of the English use of "C." The peculiar Eng- 
lish use of "CH," in such words as "church," begins in 
this period, seeming to be a sort of compromise between 
the Old English "K" sound of "C," and the French "SH" 



110 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

sound in "chivalrie" and similar words. A like change 
in the use of "G" appears in words like "genuine," also 
from the French; and the same sound was given to French 
derivative "J;" this change also being probably the result 
of the effort of English organs of speech to accommodate 
themselves to the French way of sounding these letters, 
and the objection of the French vocal organs to the English 
palatal "G." Reference has already been made to the 
interesting theory that the Old English Scribes used the 
combination "GH" to insist upon the preservation of the 
palatal quality of Old English "H," in words like "liht," 
" riht, " etc. Whatever may be the truth as to this theory, 
the fact is undoubted that this absurd spelling begins in 
this period, and seems never to have had any real use. 
The French tendency to make light of the "H," prevailed 
in these words, as well as in the initial syllable of such 
words as " honour," "honest," etc., and the silent "H," 
and still worse the silent "GH," remain among the many 
absurdities and anomalies of English spelling. Another 
of the questionable gifts of the French influence at this 
period is the "qu" combination to take the place of the 
much more rational old "CW" in the words like "quene," 
or modern "queen." "Z" begins to be used, but is rare 
as yet, to express the voiced or sonant "S." The intro- 
duction of the French use of "C," for the voiceless "S" 
seems to have prevented the success of the effort to dis- 
tinguish clearly between these sounds by a consistent use 
of "S" and "Z." The Old English letter "Thet," 9, is 
entirely disused, and the corresponding character called 
the "Thorn" letter becomes comparatively rare, their 
place being taken by the combination "TH." The letter 
"V" is much more used in the Middle English period than 
in the Old, and the same may be said of "X, " the change 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 111 

in both cases being clearly the effect of French influence. 
The vowel "Y" is not to be distinguished in Middle 
English from "I;" the umlaut "U," so far as it was used 
being transferred to the letter "U." It probably soon 
passed out of use. As a consonant, "Y" is used in middle 
English, where "J" was rarely used in Old English, and 
also to express the palatal sound of "6" in words like 
"daeg," "day," and "gear," "year." For this palatal 
"G, " a special character, 3> came into use during the 
transitional period; it is found frequently in "Layamon," 
and the earlier Middle English writers, but has passed out 
of use by the time of Chaucer. These remarks indicate 
in a general way the more important changes in the use of 
the Alphabet and in the pronunciation of English from the 
time of Alfred to the time of Chaucer. No attempt has 
been made to trace in detail the progress of these changes 
during this four hundred years; as such an effort would 
involve a technical and elaborate study of Phonetics quite 
beyond the range of this work. The general effect of 
these changes may be summed up in the statement that 
when we compare the language of Chaucer with the 
language of Alfred and Cynewulf , we find that there has 
been a great gain in richness and musical sweetness of 
sound, but that this has been gained at the cost of a dis- 
tinct loss in precision and in rugged force. 

In Grammar, Middle English shows a great advance 
toward the comparative simplicity of modern forms. The 
tendency to the elimination of needless variations, and 
the levelling of inflections to comparatively few and simple 
changes has produced marked effects. Of the ten Noun 
declensions of Old English, only three can be clearly made 
out in Chaucer's time, and of these a large majority of the 
words have passed over to what little there is left of the 



112 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"O" declension. It would be nearly accurate to say that 
in Middle English, as in Modern, there is but one declen- 
sion, with a few irregularities, showing traces of two others. 
Of the inflectional endings of the cases of nouns, there re- 
main in Middle English, in the vast majority of words, 
only the "es" and "s" of the Genitive singular and of 
all cases of the plural; and the final "E" which when used 
takes the place of any other of the case forms of the noun. 
The exceptions to this sweeping statement, however, are 
much more numerous than would have to be made to a 
corresponding general assertion as to Modern English; 
and in these exceptions will be found to a considerable 
extent to lie the peculiar quality of Middle English style 
as compared with Modern. Thus, of the "Weak" N 
declension we find a number of plurals in "en," far more 
than in modern usage, and as they are generally familiar, 
much used words, their presence gives a distinct flavor 
to the style. Some examples are "asshe," "asshen;" 
"fo," "fon," "hose," "hosen;" "oxe," "oxen;" "sho," 
"shon;" "ye," "yen." This plural in "en" is found also 
in some words which do not belong to the "Weak" N 
declension, which therefore have no special historical claim 
to it; and its use, therefore, would seem to suggest a possi- 
ble counter current to the general stream of tendency to 
level all declensions to the fragments of the "0." Some 
of these words are "doghter," "doghtren;" "suster, " 
"sustren;" "child," "children." The Umlaut, or Radi- 
cal Consonant declension is found in more instances than 
in Modern English. "Man," "men," has a Genitive 
plural form, "mennes," since somewhat simplified. In 
general, in these words, while the Umlaut plural remains, 
the Genitive and Dative are assimilated to the "0" form, 
or remain uninflected. In some of them the "es, " "s 



<< „ »> 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 113 

plural is used. In the word "boc" we have both the 
forms "bokes" and "bee." The "Weak" declension 
of the Adjective is found sometimes in the final "e;" as 
in Chaucer's phrase "the yonge sunne. " The comparison 
of Adjectives is almost the same as in Modern English, 
with some differences of spelling, and in some cases the 
persistence of the old Umlaut form; as in "long," "leng- 
er, " "lengest. " The numerals have very nearly the 
modern forms, barring differences of spelling; the forms 
"tweye," "tweyne," being found in addition to "two;" 
and "secounde" appearing from the French, as the cor- 
responding ordinal, alongside of "other," which persists 
from the Old English. The Middle English Pronoun 
freed itself from almost all the declension forms of the 
Old English Grammar. Thus for the Demonstrative, 
we have simply "that," plural "tho," for all the forms 
of Old English "se;" and "this," plural" thise," for 
all the various case and number and gender distinctions of 
Old English "3es." The archaic phrase "that-ilke," 
meaning the same, is used in Middle English in essentially 
the same sense as the definite Article "the," which, how- 
ever, is during the period, in regular use. The Personal 
Pronouns are very nearly the same as in Modern English. 
The dual forms are gone; of the cases only the Nominative 
and Objective remain. In the second person, "the" 
(modern "thee") is regularly used for the Objective 
case, and "ye" for the Nominative plural. The use of 
"y e " " vou " for the singular in respectful address is 
found in this period, doubtless coming from the French; 
and the "ou" spelling in all the words "you," "your," 
"thou," etc., shows the same French influence. In the 
third person, we notice that the "H" of "hit" is dropped 
in the Neuter Nominative-Accusative, though this is not 



114 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

invariable; that "she" takes the place of "hie" for the 
Feminine Nominative singular; and that the Objective 
plural is "hem," corresponding closely to the Old English 
Dative, "him," "heom." The final "N" of the Pos- 
sessives "mm," "thin," corresponding to the Old Eng- 
lish Genitive singular, is dropped in Middle English, 
before Consonants; and this is probably the origin of the 
modern forms "thy," "my." In the Interrogative 
Pronoun we notice the change of spelling from "HW" to 
"WH," ("hwa," "who"); a change which perhaps like 
so many others arose from the French tendency to slight 
the sound of "H;" and the forms are otherwise very close 
to those of Modern English. "Who" and "which," as 
well as "that," are used as relatives; and there are com- 
pound relative forms, illustrating the transition from the 
use of Demonstratives in the relative function; as "which- 
that," "that-he," etc. 

In the conjugation of the verbs, the great changes 
wrought by the tendency to simplification are very mani- 
fest in Middle English. The final "n" of the Old English 
plural preterite has been substituted for the "aj)" of the 
Old English plural present, and in both tenses it is very 
frequently dropped, levelling these forms to identity with 
the first person singular. The same change took place 
in the Infinitive; that is, the ending "an," was dropped 
leaving the form identical with the first person singular 
and all the plural forms of the Indicative; but in this case 
the need of some distinction led to the transfer to the 
Infinitive of the "to" of the Old English Gerundive. 
Thus in Old English we had Infinitive "singan, " Gerund- 
ive "to singanne. " In Middle English the Gerundive 
disappears, and we have Infinitive "to singe." 

The Present Participle takes the ending "ynge, " instead 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 115 

of the older "ende;" thus Old English "singende," Mid- 
dle English "singynge;" and the Past Participle, also, 
frequently drops the final "n," and the prefix "y," which 
generally takes the place of the Old English "ge;" thus, 
for Old English "gesungen," we may have "ysungen, " 
or "sungen," or "sunge. " Forms are found correspond- 
ing to the principal parts of all the six "Ablaut" series; 
but they are greatly simplified in conjugation. The 
Reduplicating verb can be distinguished, but we do not 
see the "eo" form in the Preterite, its place being taken 
by the "ew" of such verbs as "know," "knew," 
"grow," "grew." Of the "Weak" verbs, the preterite 
"de," or "d, " as in the verb "herde," corresponds to 
the First class, the intermediate vowel "e" of the Old 
English being dropped, where it would be found in the 
older forms; and the form "ede," "ed," corresponds to 
the Second class, as in the verb "lovede," for the Old 
English "lufode," the "o" of the Old English being 
weakened to "e," a change found in hundreds of in- 
stances, during this period. The Third class of "Weak" 
verbs is not distinguished from the First and Second, in 
Middle English, but we find examples of the Preteritive 
Presents, or the "Strong Weak" verbs, as "wot," "wist," 
and others, all more or less radically changed in spelling. 
The irregular, or anomalous verbs show many changes; 
among the more interesting of which are the disappearance 
of the forms of the substantive verb beginning with "S," 
as "sie," "sind," and the appearance of "wente," as a 
preterite of "go," alongside of "yede," the Middle 
English form of Old English "eode." A large number 
of the Strong verbs, in the Middle English period, are 
passing over, or have already passed over to the "Weak" 
form. We find sometimes the two forms side by side; as 



116 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

in the Reduplicating verbs "slepe," and "wepe," both 
of which have in Middle English a double preterite form : 
"slep" or "slepte," and "wep" or "wepte." 

The Grammar of Chaucer's time is much nearer to 
Modern than to Old English. It shows, in full and free 
operation, all the chief tendencies which have produced 
our modern way of speaking, with the single exception of 
the great shift in the sound of the vowels. The five 
hundred years since Chaucer, have made much fewer and 
slighter changes in English grammar than did the four 
hundred before him; and if Spenser's famous phrase: 
"Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled," may be quoted 
with reference to the vocabulary, it may be repeated with 
even less of qualification with reference to the Grammar. 



CHAPTER IX 

Period of Modern English HOO-1900. General 
Historical Conditions. 

THE Modern Period of the English Language 
begins, as the Period of Middle English ends, 
with Chaucer. A superficial study of the Lan- 
guage at that time might indeed lead to the mis- 
taken conclusion that it is more closely allied to the an- 
cient than to the modern forms of English; and ordinary 
popular speech, if it deals with the matter at all, generally 
lumps everything before Shakespeare loosely together as 
"Early English." There are, of course, marked differ- 
ences between the English of Chaucer and that of Brown- 
ing and Roiskin; differences great enough to render modern- 
ized versions, such as these made by Dry den and Pope, 
necessary to enable the modern reader, unacquainted 
with Middle English, to get the story of Chaucer's poems 
without labor; and in the process to spoil the effect of the 
poetry. A superficial study of the language might indeed 
make the impression that Middle English is nearer to Old 
than to Modern, but a more careful study always reverses 
it. Just as Chaucer's thought is essentially modern, in 
spite of his medieval background and atmosphere; so his 
language is essentially modern in spite of its ancient 
spelling and pronunciation. Even these particulars have 
more resemblance to Modern than to Old English, and in 
the Grammar, this modern quality is yet more evident. 
The fundamental changes which make Modern English 

117 



118 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

essentially different from Old English are, for the most 
part, found in the later Middle English. The principle 
of the free borrowing of foreign and especially of French 
and Latin roots, is thoroughly established; and in the 
matter of the French additions to the vocabulary the 
great work has been done. The proportion of foreign 
words in the working speech of Literature and conversa- 
tion, has not increased since Chaucer's day. The principle 
of dispensing with inflectional endings and using preposi- 
tions and auxiliaries to indicate cases, modes and tenses 
is in full and free operation. The shifting of vowel and 
consonant sounds and the changes in the Alphabet are 
going on; and those to follow are certainly not more im- 
portant than those which have already been accomplished. 
The difference, henceforth, is a difference of the degree to 
which the tendencies to change may reach; not a differ- 
ence of fundamental elements of sound, or word forma- 
tion, or syntax; and our difficulty will be to make definite 
and clearly marked points in this gradual and often im- 
perceptible process of development which has brought 
about the great change, great though not fundamental, 
between Middle and Modern English. 

The greatest for*ce which affects language and Litera- 
ture during the two hundred years from Chaucer to 
Shakespeare is undoubtedly the thought movement known 
as the Renaissance; and the best that can be done toward 
a study of the more general features of that change will be 
an attempt at a more definite notion of the chief elements 
in the great Renaissance movement, which may be thought 
of as especially conditioning the development of the lan- 
guage. 

An important feature of the Renaissance was a revival 
of interest in the study of the Greek and Latin classics. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 119 

Latin, to be sure, dominated the thought of the Middle 
ages; emphasis enough has been put upon that fact. 
Vergil and Cicero were then read by everyone who pre- 
tended to scholarship, and Latin was the language of the 
University and of the Church. The Renaissance, how- 
ever, greatly broadened the acquaintance of scholars with 
Latin writers ; and opened to them a practically new world 
of thought in the great Greek philosophers, historians, 
and dramatists. The effect of all this upon the language 
is seen, among others, in the following three particulars: 
(a) the introduction of many new words of literary and 
philosophical quality; (b) the familiar use of the classical 
history, myth and legend, so that names of Latin and 
Greek heroes, gods, demi-gods, nymphs, fauns and satyrs 
became part of the working material of English; and (c) 
the formation of a classical style, leading to the use of 
Latin forms of sentence structure, which is noticeable in 
the prose writings of the Elizabethan time. 

Again it must be remembered that the Renaissance 
movement reached England through Continental Europe, 
and to some extent, through the influence of Italian 
writers. Already in Chaucer we find Italian Literature 
almost as familiar as French; and through his use of 
Italian sources for the plots of his narrative poems, Italian 
ideas and words were brought into English. In the later 
Renaissance period this Italian influence is yet more 
manifest. Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and all 
the rest of the writers of the time, show the influence of 
their acquaintance with Italian Literature; Art came to 
England in Italian forms; the sonnet comes over from 
Italian poetry into English; Italian music, with its melo- 
dious tones in the voices of singers and the sounds of its 
musical instruments, brings also its sweet sounding words 
into English speech. 



120 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

The Renaissance included, also, a wonderful awakening 
of the spirit of scientific research. As yet the principle of 
inductive reasoning which has brought about the great 
advance in scientific inquiry during the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries had not been well applied; so that 
the purely scientific discoveries of the Renaissance period 
are comparatively few and unimportant when measured 
by those of the nineteenth Century; but such practical 
inventions as the use of the mariner's compass, the applica- 
tion of gunpowder to war, and the use of the printing 
press are not inferior in their effect upon life to any of 
those that have followed. What more directly applies 
to our special topic is the fact that this Renaissance time 
was full of talking and writing on scientific subjects, and 
thus a great deal of scientific matter finds its way into 
the language. Alchemy and Astrology were still com- 
monly believed in and practised; but Chemistry and 
Astronomy were coming to the knowledge and making 
their way into the common speech of men. There was 
also an attempt at a scientific study of the principles of 
government, with the result that the Greek and Latin 
terms which express those ideas are found in large numbers 
in the Literature of the time. 

One direct result of the invention of the Mariner's 
Compass was the enormous increase of travel and explora- 
tion which was one of the most striking characteristics of 
the period. Englishmen were led by this to study other 
languages as they had never done before. Works of travel, 
telling the story of these journeys and explorations, 
abounded; habits, institutions and languages of all sorts 
of diverse people became familiar to the English people, 
and were discussed and described in English; and a general 
open mindedness and breadth of view came to the people, 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 121 

which could not fail to have a strong effect upon the 
speech. >. 

A feature of the Renaissance of very great significance 
for our subject was the great religious revolution commonly 
spoken of as the Protestant Reformation. An important 
effect of this in all European countries w T here it took strong 
hold upon the people was the change of the religious ser- 
vices from Latin to the vernacular language. Hymns, 
prayers, all the religious ceremonies of the church, in 
England, henceforth had to be put into the English lan- 
guage, so that the common people might understand and 
use them. There was a great increase of interest in 
religious matters, so that popular preaching was multiplied 
and religious subjects were discussed by everyone. One 
can scarcely fail to see how through the demands thus 
made upon it the language would gain in power to express 
religious ideas. Chief of all the matters which come under 
this aspect of the subject was the making of the English 
Bible. Wyclif, in the Middle English period, had pro- 
duced a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate 
into the popular language of his time; and all through the 
period of the Renaissance there were efforts under the 
stimulus of the Reformation, including the Roman Catho- 
lic resistance and reaction, to prepare versions of the Bible 
in the contemporary speech. Finally, as the result of these 
efforts, continuing for nearly a hundred years beginning 
with Tyndale's version in 1525, appeared the King James 
or "Authorized" version in 1611. This work of translat- 
ing the Bible had naturally a strong influence upon the 
development of the language. The various versions were 
widely read and criticized; thousands of people studied 
them; quotations from them are found frequently in all 
forms of the Literature of the time, even such a writer as 



122 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Shakespeare showing in his plays how these English ver- 
sions of the Bible had already made their way into the 
minds of the people of England. 

The great general development of Literature, in Eng- 
land in the time of the Renaissance, resulted in a great 
expansion and at the same time in a great increase of the 
power of exact expression in the language. This was the 
time of the culmination of Dramatic Poetry; the Lyric 
poetry of the Elizabethan period is inferior only to the 
Dramatic; and while the prose writing of the time does 
not hold a position of such supreme excellence as com- 
pared with that of later times, there were great prose 
writers ; and in the hands of such men as Hooker, Sydney, 
Raleigh, Jeremy Taylor and Bacon, the language could 
not fail to make notable advances in power of expression. 
The most important source of language growth is probably 
popular use; for it is in the talk of the streets, the homes, 
the clubs, the social gatherings, that words and phrases 
pass from slang to idiom, that new sounds and new gram- 
matical forms come into good usage; but, though secondary, 
Literature is a very important source of language growth. 
Besides registering and sanctioning the changes made by 
popular use, Literature opens up new lines of thought, 
discusses new problems or throws new light upon old ones, 
and every vigorous, creative thinker and writer creates 
new words and phrases as well as new ideas. Now the 
later Renaissance period was, in England, a great creative 
period in Literature. Shakespeare was one of a multitude 
of writers ; and these writers made so many and such great 
additions to the resources of the language that Modern 
English might almost be called their creation. 

All these many elements in the Renaissance were con- 
ditioned in their effect upon the language by the invention 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 123 

of printing. This was both a stimulus and a check upon 
the language movement. It was a stimulus because by 
the cheapening of books and the comparative ease of 
publication it enormously stimulated Literature, and 
because it brought the changes in words and forms made 
or suggested or reported by writers before the eyes of 
multitudes of persons who in the days of manuscript 
publication would never have seen them. It was a check 
because it registered in permanent form, where they were 
easy of reference and generally accessible, both these 
tentative changes and the current established forms of 
speech. Thus it became more possible to challenge the 
new form of speech, the newly coined word, or the newly 
suggested phrase, compare it with the old, and decide 
whether it was worthy of permanence. There is a good 
deal of discussion of points of this nature among the 
Elizabethan writers; the process of development was not 
entirely unconscious. Yet probably the unconscious 
judgment of the reading public was more efficient than 
this conscious work of the scholars and writers. It is 
surprising how well and how successfully popular judg- 
ment does this delicate critical work. The writings of 
the Elizabethans are full of words and phrases which 
were never condemned by any literary or linguistic author- 
ity, but which the judgment of the general public has 
condemned as needless, and which have therefore fallen 
obsolete; and it is the printer who has made this judgment 
practicable and effective. 

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the importance of 
the Renaissance in the history of our language. Many 
changes occurred later and changes will still occur as long 
as the language remains alive; for it must adapt itself 
to the changing needs of the changing generations. But 



124 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the Renaissance gave Modern English its characteristic 
qualities; qualities which it is not likely ever to lose. 
Especially the two greatest literary monuments of the 
period, the English Bible and the Dramas of Shakespeare, 
have set a standard of English which is likely to endure. 
Progressive influences will doubtless draw the language 
away towards various changing ideals; but the conserva- 
tive forces which grow in power with the increase of liter- 
ary intelligence and taste will tend strongly to hold the 
language to this standard. Prophecy is always danger- 
ous, but if we put it far enough in the future we are not 
in much risk of being confuted. On this principle it would 
be safe to prophesy that however great may be the changes 
which time brings about, the English speaking people of 
the year 3000 A. D. will still use the language of Shake- 
speare and the King James Bible, as the standard of good 
literary form. Or to put it in a more reasonable form, it 
is a proposition for which a strong argument could be 
made, that a substantially permanent form and quality 
was given to English by the influences of the Renaissance. 

The comparatively slight changes of the Modern period 
since the Renaissance, may now be very briefly pointed out 
in some of their more important and more widely influen- 
tial phases. 

The period of English history that might be named 
from the Stuart family of Kings, and which includes the 
time of the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Res- 
toration, carried to further development some of the 
influences noted in connection with the Renaissance. 
Even more than the earlier Reformation period, this time 
was marked by intense religious discussions. Especially 
during the Civil War and the Commonwealth did these 
debates become exciting and reach all classes of society. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 125 

The great events of the history, the overthrow of the 
monarchy and execution of the King, the establishment 
and carrying forward of Cromwell's government, turned 
in the minds of most men on religious considerations, 
and were debated in Biblical language. Problems of 
church government and doctrinal belief were questions on 
which political parties divided, elections were decided, 
for which bloody battles were fought, which determined 
business success or failure, by means of which fortunes 
were made or lost. All this, besides the real moral and 
spiritual interest of such problems continually under dis- 
cussion, could not fail to make a strong impression on the 
language. Milton and Bunyan, the two greatest forces 
in the Literature of the time, show in every line of their 
writings the effect of this intense religious movement, 
Milton connecting it with the scholarly, artistic tendencies 
of the Renaissance, and Bunyan carrying it into the every 
day experiences of the common people. Even so essential- 
ly unreligious a nature as Dryden, the great poet and 
critic of the time of the Restoration, and who may be 
called the father of the classical movement in Literature, 
shows the effect of this religious tendency in the subject 
matter and style of his works; "Absalom and Achitophel, " 
and "The Hind and the Panther," two of the most im- 
portant of his longer poems, being striking illustrations. 
A peculiar example of this characteristic of the time, 
though so peculiar as to be grotesque and therefore not 
permanent, was the wide spread use of religious and Bibli- 
cal proper names. When we read such names as "Praise 
God Barebones," and find commonly used among the 
people names of almost all the Old Testament worthies, 
even such obscure and uneuphonious titles as "Shear 
Jashub," and "Keren Happuch;" while the beautiful 



126 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

New Testament graces of "Faith," "Hope," "Charity," 
"Mercy," "Temperance," "Prudence," and "Grace" 
itself, become favorite names for women, we see simply 
one striking illustration of a tendency which has enriched 
the English language with thousands of expressions for 
moral and spiritual ideas. 

Very different was the effect of the next period of 
change and development, that of the last years of the 
Seventeenth and the first three-quarters of the Eighteenth 
centuries. In the histories of Literature this is often 
called the Classical period, from the fact that in Literature 
the Greek and Latin classical writers were made the models 
which all writers strove to imitate, and that there was a 
strong and conscious effort to establish rules and stand- 
ards of form in writing and to hold men to those stand- 
ards. Sometimes the period is called the "Queen Anne" 
period, because some of its ablest writers flourished dur- 
ing the reign of that monarch; and sometimes the "Augus- 
tan, " from a fancied resemblance to the period of Vergil 
and Horace, the "Augustan " age of Latin Literature. The 
chief importance of the period for the history of the lan- 
guage lies in the emphasis laid upon the Latin element of 
the vocabulary, the development of precision in prose 
style, and the accompanying awakened interest in philo- 
logical study resulting in the first important English 
Dictionaries. The effect of the close, almost worshipful 
attention given to the Latin writers is obvious in the large 
percentage of Latin roots in the diction of all the authors 
of the time; and this, of course, fixed many such words 
in popular use and made them permanent elements in the 
language. There was also a great deal of attention given 
to prose form in composition; so much so that some critics 
have said that English prose style was created during 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 127 

this period. This topic is more closely related to Rhetoric 
than to the proper subject of our study, but in some of 
its aspects it is important for us. The close attention 
given to the formation of sentences and paragraphs, the 
awakening of a sense of style, had an inevitable and strong 
influence upon the use of words and upon the fixing and 
refinement of grammatical distinctions. 

It is noticeable that the influences just referred to bear 
a resemblance to some of those noticed as the effect of 
the Renaissance. As the spirit of the Greek and Latin 
writers moved the spirits of English writers, then, so the 
form of the Latin and Greek writers determined the form 
of English writers, now. There is yet another parallel 
and contrast between the two epochs, in the effect upon 
English form and thought of contemporary foreign in- 
fluence. What Italy was to the sixteenth and the early 
part of the seventeenth century, as the minister of the 
ideas of the Renaissance, that France was to the later 
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as the minister 
of modern scientific, philosophic and artistic ideas. The 
close association of the English and French Courts in the 
time of the Stuarts brought French fashions and French 
Literature into familiar touch with the English; and as 
this was the great period of French classical Literature, 
and of the greatest political and social developments in 
France, the effect upon English thought and literary 
form was inevitably very great. French words, names 
and phrases, especially in matters of fashion and warfare, 
became naturalized in English in large numbers. 

The effect of the classical movement in establishing a 
standard of prose style, particularly in giving models of 
sentence and paragraph structure not likely ever to be 
surpassed, the work of Dryden, Swift, Addison, Gold- 



128 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

smith and Johnson, is probably its most important in- 
fluence upon the language; but much was done also for 
fixing a standard usage in the spelling and definition of 
words by Johnson's Dictionary, whose publication, in the 
later years of the eighteenth century, must be noted as 
one of the greatest events in the history of the English 
Language. The "Dictionary'' is largely responsible for 
what unity and consistency in these matters is to be found 
in modern usage; and it stands as probably the strongest 
conservative barrier, for good and for evil, against modern 
attempts at reform in spelling, and modern tendencies to 
change in the use of words and in the introduction of new 
forms. 

In passing to the consideration of the history of the 
last hundred years, serious difficulties interfere with the 
effort to select the most important characteristics of the 
language development. It is always hard to describe 
movements in the midst of which one is living, and with 
whose current one is moving. Yet it does not require any 
impossible detachment from one's personal point of view 
to be sure that the last century has been one of enormous 
expansion for the English people and language. The third 
England of which the historian Freeman spoke has come 
into existence as a force for the language, during this period; 
and one might without much exaggeration add that a 
fourth and a fifth England are to be reckoned with, in 
Australia and South Africa. Certainly New England, in 
the broad sense, or as some prefer to call it "Greater 
England, " is henceforth the home of the English language. 
Americanisms, if they are useful needed changes in the 
language, have just as good a right to exist as Briticisms, 
for they are both alike Anglicisms. The English speaking 
people are now occupying and ruling a large part of the 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 129 

world, sometimes estimated at one-fourth of the whole, 
and the tendency to expansion shows no sign of weaken- 
ing; and wherever they go they carry with them substan- 
tially unchanged their historic speech. Circumstances and 
places, of course, compel additions and adaptations of the 
old tongue for the new uses. Thus the vocabulary is 
gaining additions from a wide variety of sources; and 
forms of expression, ways of spelling, tricks of pronuncia- 
tion, inevitably make their way into standard English from 
all these widely scattered homes of the common speech. 
The wonderful development of science and invention, the 
immense changes in industrial life, the ceaseless and un- 
limited travel and exploration, the close contact with the 
nations of the world; in a word, the immeasurable broaden- 
ing of the field of thought, has resulted in a wide expansion 
of the language. 

Along with this wide expansion has gone a noteworthy 
unification of the speech of the race. With the improve- 
ment of the means of transportation and the consequent 
increase of travel, dialects become less distinctive, the 
speech of different sections tends to conform to that of the 
social center. It may be still true that an English peasant 
from a remote country district of Yorkshire could hardly 
make himself understood in London; but probably the 
proportion of those who would be thus troubled, to the 
whole population, is very much less than it was. In 
America, where though the distances are so much greater 
than in England, the habit of travel has always been so 
much more general, there never has been any such marked 
difference of dialect as in England; and the differences of 
pronunciation and phraseology which have distinguished 
North from South, or East from West, are growing less 
marked every year. With the rapid diffusion of elemen- 



130 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

tary education, the difference in language between different 
social classes is also fast disappearing. Sometimes one is 
troubled by the fear that the speech of the educated 
classes is being vulgarized; but it is probably more true 
to say that the speech of the hitherto uneducated classes 
is being refined. Our modern democratic social life is 
bringing all classes into closer touch with one another; 
and while the blending of their modes of speech may have 
some surprising and questionable results, there is good 
reason to hope that it is working out a speech of the future, 
which will not be radically different from that of the past 
and which so far as it is different will be better. There 
will be many changes, but according to the analogy of the 
past, those which become permanent shpuld be improve- 
ments. This last aspect of the matter makes it a very 
practical subject for the present generation. As we are 
making history, so we are making the language of the 
future. We have a serious responsibility in regard to this 
wonderful instrument of expression, the English language; 
not to corrupt it; to use it freely but wisely, that from our 
lips and pens it may pass on to the use of others, not 
muddied by our impurities or stupidities, but at least as 
clear, as true, as strong for the utterance of truth as it 
came to us. 



CHAPTER X 

Period of Modern English. The Vocabulary. 

WITH the revival of interest in classical 
Latin Literature, which was an important 
feature of the Renaissance, came another 
large group of words of Latin derivation 
intoj English. This was felt mainly, of course, among 
scholars and literary men; but that which becomes well 
established in the usage of Literature works its way out 
into the general use of the people, just as what has estab- 
lished itself in general popular use is likely to work its way 
into the use of the literary class. There was during the 
Renaissance a great deal of study of social and political 
problems, and probably the best illustrations of the Renais- 
sance additions of Latin roots to the language would be 
found in that phase of the Literature of the time. As the 
Romans were the teachers of the world in matters of 
government, words of Latin origin would naturally abound 
in treatises -on subjects connected with government. 
More's "Utopia" was originally written in Latin; and 
Bacon and Milton both wrote some of their most important 
works in that language. The words "politics," "govern- 
ment," "representative," are examples of the large num- 
ber of such words which came into English in connection 
with the Renaissance Literature. 

Words of Hebrew and Greek origin, which were brought 
into English in connection with religious thought and life, 
belong in largest numbers to three special epochs of His- 

131 



132 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

tory; the conversion of the English to Christianity in the 
Old English period, the Reformation, or Protestant revolu- 
tion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the 
Puritan movement of the time of the Stuart Kings and 
the Commonwealth. The Renaissance was, however, 
also a time of revived interest in Greek Philosophy and 
Literature, and Greek derivatives of that type, beginning 
to show themselves in Chaucer, are greatly multiplied in 
the centuries immediately following. " Chirurgery , " 
"Hyperbole," "Parabola," are familiar examples of the 
class which keep their Greek form with very little change. 
The word "Presbyter" illustrates the same type of word 
development in the religious sphere. Old English had 
coined from Greek 7rp€o/3viepo<s " Presbuteros, " the 
much changed word "priest." The theologians of the 
Renaissance introduced the word "Presbyter," almost 
exactly in the Greek form, as the name of an order in the 
Clergy. In the Stuart times this word came to have a 
special sense as the official name of an officer in the "Pres- 
byterian" church. Milton was etymologically right, 
whatever may be said about his opinions in matters of 
Theology and Church Government, when he wrote: "New 
Presbyter is but old priest writ large. " Some other Greek 
derivatives of this class are "chorus," "choir," (though 
the same word in the spelling "quire" and "cwire" is 
found earlier) , " catechism, " " dogma, " " catholic. " These 
all have religious or ecclesiastical associations ; but there is 
a large group of less direct Greek derivatives which have 
come into English use by a variety of other channels. 
Many of these are so greatly changed that the Greek 
origin is veiled, and it may require somewhat careful 
observation to perceive it. Such are "fancy," later form 
of Middle English "fantasie," "isthmus," "cynic," 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 133 

"cube, " "irony, " "epicure. " In recent times mechanical 
invention has been a fruitful source of Greek derivatives 
added to the English vocabulary. There has been an 
international quasi agreement among investigators and 
inventors to use terms of Greek origin for new things and 
new ideas. Thus the whole field of electric discovery is 
full of examples of the use of Greek terms for new inven- 
tions. The words "electric" and "electricity" themselves 
are Greek. "Thermometer," "telegraph" and "tele- 
phone" are examples of familiar English words which were 
consciously constructed for English use by compounding 
simple Greek terms ; and with the great increase in modern 
inventions and this tendency to use Greek terms for the 
new things invented we are likely to have many more such 
words. Sometimes the mixture of Greek with other roots 
gives queer combinations; as in the word widely used in 
America for the horseless carriage, "Automobile," where 
one element is Greek and the other French. 

It is rather the superficial aspects of the Renaissance 
that find expression in words of Italian derivation. Fash- 
ions in Literature take an Italian color and this shows 
itself in such words as "sonnet," "stanza," "canto" 
and "novel." Fashions in Architecture appear in words 
like "dome," "cupola," "piazza" and "portico"; and 
in Music in the technical terms, "allegro," "adagio," 
"forte," and the more familiar "duet" and "opera." 
The use of these words goes to show that English taste in 
these arts was more or less influenced by Italian forms, 
but not that English thought was to any great degree 
guided by Italian ideals. 

Elizabethan Literature shows the introduction into 
English of about as many Dutch words as Italian. A 
little group of nautical terms, such as "boom," "cruise, " 



134 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"sloop," "yacht," suggests that the English people of 
the time were going to school to the Dutch in matters of 
the sea. Shakespeare has a number of Dutch words such 
as "deck," "snap," "snuff," "switch," which are not 
found earlier and have kept their place in the language, 
while French words which are new in Shakespeare have 
generally fallen obsolete. 

The intercourse of English speaking people with Spanish 
has been largely in war; but war as well as peace brings 
nations together, and from the Spanish wars words have 
come from Spanish into English, as the great "Armada" 
which brought many luckless Spaniards to perish in Eng- 
lish seas. In the Sixteenth century the Spaniards led the 
world in the exploration, colonization and conquest of 
new lands; and, especially from America, many words 
naming and describing the strange places, plants, animals 
and human beings they observed have come from their 
writings into English. Such are "alligator," "arma- 
dillo," "mosquito," "creole;" while more specifically 
associated with the Spanish settlements in North America 
are "mustang," "quadroon," "ranch," "savanna." 

Portuguese words have reached English chiefly by way 
of commercial intercourse, but sometimes by the use in the 
writings of travellers, of Portuguese names for things first 
observed by the Portuguese, they having at one time 
rivalled the Spanish as explorers and colonizers. "Al- 
bino," "apricot," "banana," "cocoa," "flamingo," 
"marmalade," "molasses," "negro," are examples of 
words which are probably of Portuguese origin, though in 
the case of some of them there is some doubt whether they 
may not have originated in Spanish. 

Arabic words continued to be added to English, in- 
directly through other languages and especially through 






THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 135 

Spanish, from the intercourse of that people with the 
Moors in consequence of their long occupation of southern 
Spain; and in less numbers directly, through the various 
forms of intercourse with Arabic speaking people in modern 
times. There is a considerable group of words ultimately 
of Arabic origin which have become as familiar as any in 
the English vocabulary. Articles in constant use, as 
"jar," "magazine," "sherbet" have these Arabic names; 
and words almost if not quite as familiar like "gazelle," 
"tariff," "zenith," "zero," show how closely such an 
alien people as the Arabs may enter into our life through 
the words they contribute to our speech. 

Words that came into English from French, early in 
the history of the language, may be distinguished from 
those that have been borrowed later by the fact that their 
pronunciation has been made to conform to English rules, 
while those of later origin retain the French sounds. Thus 
we have the words "vine," early, and "ravine," late, in 
which the relative date of the word's adoption into Eng- 
lish may be inferred from the sound of the vowel "I." 
"Feast," "fete;" "service," "caprice;" "grandeur," 
"douceur;" "honour," "amour;" "critic," "critique;" 
"beauty," "beau;" "corpse," "corps," and many other 
such pairs of words illustrate the same principle. It is 
worth noting also that French words do not always dis- 
place the corresponding word of pure English derivation, 
but that both remain in use giving more exact expression 
to varying phases of the same idea. Already in the early 
Middle English period the custom of using the French 
term for the food prepared for the table and the English 
for the animal, had established itself. Walter Scott brings 
this out in the first Chapter of Ivanhoe. Thus the animal 
in the pen is called "swine," good Old English, but when 



136 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

he is brought to the table he becomes French "pork." 
So with "ox" and "beef," "calf" and "veal," "sheep" 
and "mutton." There are some instances, also, of words 
of the two classes used with scarcely any perceptible 
difference of meaning; as for example this very word, 
"meaning" and its French double "signification;" "love" 
and "affection;" "strength" and "force." An important 
class of words which Literature has brought into English 
from French hold their place in the language because they 
express the idea they stand for more accurately, with a 
more delicate shading of the meaning than would be 
possible with words of pure English derivation. Such 
words are "duel," "duet," (ultimately Italian-Latin, 
but coming to English through French), "naivete," 
"rendezvous," "matinee." The attempt to substitute 
words or phrases of pure English for these will make it 
clear how much English sometimes gains by borrowing 
from other languages rather than developing from native 
roots or compounding original English words. The lan- 
guage has undoubtedly in this way gained greatly in rich- 
ness and variety of expression; and the masterly use of 
these varied elements of the vocabulary, especially the 
delicate handling of the synonyms, with their finely sug- 
gestive distinctions, is one of the marks of power in English 
style. 

There are some groups of words of French derivation 
which vividly suggest the phases of life and thought which 
have been especially under the influence of French ideas. 
To present this topic effectively it will be necessary to 
treat together those words which belong to the Middle 
and to the early Modern periods, as from this point of view 
the difference between the years 1300 and 1600 is not 
particularly significant. Thus it is a commonplace idea 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 137 

that in matters of dress and food the French people at- 
tained a high state of civilization earlier than the English, 
and consequently we find many words of French origin 
relating to these important if prosaic spheres of life. 
Modes and fashions in clothing and cookery still come from 
France, and many familiar words come with them. We 
wear English "shoes" but French "boots, " English "hats" 
but French "bonnets," English "shirts," but French 
"coats" and "jackets" and "blouses," and so the list 
might be indefinitely extended. The fashion of putting 
bills of fare into modern French and calling them "menus " 
seems in some aspects a silly fashion, but it has a rational 
basis in the fact that for centuries the best cooking known 
to English speaking people has been done by the French, 
and therefore to name accurately the best dishes one must 
use French words. And lest this should seem to give 
undue importance to a frivolous topic consider the words 
of "Owen Meredith:" 

"We may live without poetry, music, and art; 
We may live without conscience and live without heart; 
We may live without friends; we may live without 

books; 
But civilized man cannot live without cooks." 

When we sit down to the French "table, " we may begin 
with French "soup" and English "bread," unless we pre- 
fer French "biscuit;" our "fish" is English, but we shall 
probably eat it with French "sauce" or "gravy. " It was 
Madame DeStael, I think — but I have not been able to 
verify this reference, — who said: "The English are a 
people who have many religions but only one gravy." 
Our "roast" or "boiled" "beef" or "mutton" or "pork" 



138 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

are all French; only the "fowl" is English. The Spanish 
"potatoes" and English "beans" and "turnips" are all 
French "vegetables." When the French "dessert" is 
reached it is likely to be French "pastry" and "fruit," 
and the meal will come to an artistic finish with an English 
"cup" of Arabic "coffee." The French also gave to English 
much of the language of sport, it being probably the Nor- 
man strain in their blood rather than the Saxon which 
makes them such keen and untiring sportsmen. This is 
certainly true of Hawking, the favorite sport of the middle 
ages, and of most modern games; though "hunt" and 
"shoot" are English words. Though the English in mod- 
ern times have at least held their own in wars with the 
French the tendency to use French words for military 
ideas persists. In addition to those noted in previous 
periods, "fort," "march," "general," "colonel," "ma- 
jor," "soldier," "rapier," "sabre," "cannon," "musket" 
may be cited as examples of the prevalence of French roots 
in the expression of ideas connected with war. The sword 
is almost the only weapon which retains an English name, 
and the sword is an obsolete weapon used nowadays mainly 
for ornament, and frequently discarded entirely. 

A group of French derivatives appearing first in writers 
of about the time of Dry den gives interesting suggestions 
as to the fashions, the foibles, the ideals of the England of 
the Restoration and of the beginning of the eighteenth 
century. The typical society figures of the time come 
before our eyes in the words "beau," "belle," "coquette," 
"brunette." Such words as "caprice," "naive," "grim- 
ace," "repartee," "raillery," help us in imagination to 
hear and see them in conversation. One may follow the 
man of pleasure of the time through some of his haunts, 
and gain a suggestion as to his character in the words 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 139 

"ball," "ballet," "intrigue," "debauchee." The art 
peculiar to the England of two hundred years ago comes 
dimly to view in "profile," "miniature," "guitar;" the 
Literature in "gazette," "lampoon," "memoir," "cri- 
tique;" and the warfare in " ambuscade, "" campaign, " 
" cannonnade, " with a foreshadowing of the horrors that 
were to mark the end of the century in France, in the word 
"barricade." 

As English speaking people have travelled around the 
globe, colonized and conquered in every region, by their 
all embracing commercial system drawn the things 
they desired from every country, they have marked this 
world wide activity by the words added to the language. 
Thus from the North American Indians they have taken 
"moccasin," "moose," "opossum, " "tomahawk, " "wig- 
wam;" from the West Indies, "canoe," "hurricane," 
"tobacco;" from Mexico, "chocolate" and "tomato;" 
and from South America, "tapioca, " "jaguar, " "petunia," 
"quinine." From the savage African tribes they have 
taken the "canary" and the "guinea;" from Egypt, "oa- 
sis" and "paper;" from Australia come "boomerang" and 
"kangaroo;" from China "tea" and "nankeen;" from 
the Malays, "bamboo," "gong," "gutta-percha," "rat- 
tan;" from Polynesia, "taboo;" from India, "bangle," 
"chintz," "loot," "jungle." The Persians give us "can- 
dy," "musk," "punch," (the beverage), "bazaar," "car- 
avan," "chess," "lemon," "lilac," "magic," "orange," 
"paradise;" the Turks contribute "bosh," "horde" and 
"ottoman;" and the Russians, "czar," (this, of course 
ultimately from Latin "Caesar"), "mammoth" and 
"knout." 

The vocabulary of English has developed, during the 
Modern PeriodT according to the principles which have 



140 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

been noted in all the history of the language. It has in- 
creased to some extent by development from native roots, 
notably in the new preterites and participles formed for 
the verbs, bringing so many to the weak conjugation which 
were originally strong, developing verbs from nouns and 
nouns from verbs, and in the simplified declensions of the 
nouns and pronouns. Various examples of these will ap- 
pear in the discussion of the Grammar. This process, 
however, while adding new forms, has eliminated a large 
number of the older words, and so has resulted on the 
whole in a reduction rather than an increase of the vocab- 
ulary. This reduction has been made up many times 
over by the increase in words borrowed from other lan- 
guages. French continues to be the largest source for these 
borrowings; but every language of the world with which 
the English people have come into any sort of close rela- 
tions has added something to the resources of English 
speech. The remarkable thing in this matter is the 
thoroughness with which English has assimilated this mass 
of foreign material, so that a large proportion of these 
borrowed words have become just as English in their 
quality as the native words. This power of assimilation, 
apparently shared to the same degree by no other language - 
gives some color of reason to the thought that English, 
rather than Esperanto, or any artificial tongue, may have 
to do the work of a universal language. It is estimated 
that English is now spoken by about two hundred millions 
of the people of the world, and the rapid increase of this 
number in recent years, with the increase in the political 
and social influence of English in the world makes the 
dream of universality not entirely irrational. 



CHAPTER XI 

Period of Modern English. Pronunciation and 

Spelling. 

IN the changes in the sounds of the letters of the 
Alphabet and the diphthongal combinations, from 
the Middle to the Modern Period, as in those appar- 
ently going on today, the working of the conservative 
and the progressive tendencies noted all along may be traced 
quite clearly. The most radical of the changes is the shift 
of the sound of the letters "A," "E," "I; ' and one of the 
clearest illustrations of the conservative tendency is the 
return to the simple "A" to express the sound which was 
written, in Old English, "AE." The wide extension of 
the language in recent years and the intermingling of people 
of different dialectal peculiarities, while tending toward an 
ultimate uniformity, has resulted at present in confusion 
and a real diversity, among those equally entitled to con- 
sideration as standards of good usage, which forbids dog- 
matism. It is with considerable hesitancy that one must 
proceed to try to point out some of the more important 
matters in the sound of modern English as compared with 
ancient and medieval. 

The confusion and diversity are especially marked in 
the modern use of the vowels. Here national habits of 
speech have developed among the people of the two great 
branches of the English speaking race those on the eastern 
side of the Atlantic giving a broader, more open sound 
especially to the vowel "A," while the American tendency 

141 



142 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

is to a flat, closer sound. The British use is undoubtedly 
to be preferred in this particular, and happily now tends 
to supplant the Afrierican, even on the western side of the 
Atlantic. Characteristic vulgarities, on the one hand 
looseness in the use of "H" and final "NG," and on the 
other hand neglect or wrong use of "R," hardly need men- 
tion, as they will probably vanish with the increase in 
general intelligence. 

The two most frequent uses of the letter "A" are both 
peculiar to the Modern as distinguished from the Old and 
the Middle periods; they are the long sound in words like 
"fate," "gate," "late," the sound which in Old and Middle 
English, as now in all other Indo-European languages is 
indicated by the long "E;" and the close short sound in 
words like "hat," "cat," "sad," the sound which in Old 
English was expressed by the digraph "ae." The origi- 
nal sound of long "A" is retained in words like "father," 
"are;" but the short open "A" of Old English "man" 
has been given over to short open "O." Another pecul- 
iarly modern use of "A" is that in the word "water" where 
it is essentially the same as that of "OA" in "broad," 
"AU" in "author," "O" in "long" and 4 '0U" in 
"thought." The older short open "A" appears in a few 
words beginning with "W," like "what," "was." These 
words in Old English were spelled with "ae," as "9aet," 
modern "that," and had the same short close sound. It 
is the influence of the "W" which has given these words 
the more open sound. Altogether nine distinct variations 
of sound can be distinguished in the modern use of the 
vowel "A." (1) "father;" (2) "ask"— as the English 
and an increasing number of Americans speak the word 
and similar words; (3) "all;" (4) "what;" (5) "fat;" 
(6) fate;" (7) "fare;" (8) "any," distinctly the short 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 143 

"E" sound; and (9) the weakened "E" sound in unac- 
cented final syllables, as in the word "servant. " 

The most frequent use of "E," also, is peculiar to 
Modern English; namely, that in which it takes the place of 
Old English long "I;" though in most cases this sound is 
found expressed by double "E," as "feet," "weep," or 
by "E" in connection with one of the other vowels, as with 
"A" in "feat," with "I" in "deceive" or in inverted 
order "relieve," or with "O" in "people." The original 
sound of "E" has been given over to long "A" except in 
a few 7 words of recent French origin, as "fete. " A singular 
anomaly is theuseof double "E," in onecase,for short "I;" 
that is, in the word " been. " Before " R, " " E " has some- 
times a modified form of the old long sound, as "there," 
"where;" and the same sound is given to the combination 
of "E" with "I" in "their," probably of Norse origin, 
and with "A" in the verb "tear," though in the noun of 
the same spelling this combination has the usual modern 
long " E " sound. The Pld English short " E " is preserved 
in most of the modern words where the vowel is short as 
"met," "pet," "get;" though in some cases before "R" 
it has the sound of "U," as "her," "were." A general 
British usage gives to "er" in certain words the sound of 
"A," as "clerk," sounded "dark," "university," sounded 
"univarsity." One of the peculiar freaks of College cus- 
tom has been the adoption of this British idiosyncrasy in 
the abbreviation of this word, as when the student speaks 
of his "varsity" boat or ball team. In final syllables, in 
many instances "E, " with the other vowels has a weakened 
"U" sound, as "reader," "leaden." 

"I," also preserves its old sound when short, as "it," 
"pit." Like "E" it keeps the old long sound in a few 
words of recent French origin, as "pique," "machine," 



144 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"ravine," and when combined with "E" in the words 
already cited under that letter and in some others like 
"bier," "grief," "chief." In the vast majority of cases, 
however, long "I" now expresses a diphthongal sound 
made up of old long "A" and old long "I," as "white," 
"kite," "ride," etc. It takes the "U" sound in connec- 
tion with "R" in such words as "fir," "first," "whirr." 
A prevalent British usage gives to the combination "EI" 
in the words "either," "neither," the long diphthongal 
"AI" sound. This usage, general among educated peo- 
ple in England, is followed by a considerable number in 
the United States; it seems a regrettable irregularity, 
though where there are so many irrational irregularities 
as there are in modern English spelling and pronunciation, 
one more or less is not very important. 

Long "O" keeps its Old English sound in the majority 
of cases, as "rode," "note," the silent final "E" serving 
in such cases with this as with the other vowels to indicate 
the quantity. It has the same sound in combination with 
"A, " as in "boat, " "goat, " and in combination with "E, " 
as in "foe," "sloe," "doe" and once where the order of 
the two letters is inverted, namely in "yeoman. " Its Old 
English short open sound is found in the most numerous 
cases of short "O" in Modern use, such as "cot," "pot," 
"body;" but in the cases where "O" in Old English stood 
for a nasalized "A," as "long," "strong," the final "G" 
has broadened the sound to one like that of "OA" in 
"broad," while with final "D" as "pond," "fond," this 
"O" retains its old short open sound. Closely similar to 
the sound in the "ONG" combination is that of "O" 
before "R" in "for," "Lord," and similar but shorter 
and closer, and more like what was probably the Old 
English short close sound is that usual in America in the 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 145 

pronunciation of the Divine name, "God," and with "G" 
or double "S" following, as "Dog," "fog," "loss," 
"cross." The right of this close sound to recognition in 
standard pronunciation is disputed by some, who insist 
that these words should all be pronounced with the 
open sound; but the Oxford Dictionary recognizes the 
correctness of the pronunciation in the words ending with 
double "S;" and the best usage in America at least, still 
stands for it in the other cases cited above. There is a 
large group of words in which "O" has a "U" sound, 
either long or short. Such are "move," "work," "wolf." 
In many instances this is merely a substitution of "O" 
for "U" in the spelling, the pronunciation retaining the 
sound of the Old English letter. In some cases the original 
letter was " Y, " which in Old English had the value of the 
German umlaut "U," and in some others it was "EO" 
which in Old English frequently interchanged with "U. " 
In cases where this etymological reason for the sound can- 
not be shown, it may be explained by attraction of similar 
words, arising from the general tendency to assimilation. 
The double "O," which often corresponds to Old English 
long "O," and which in Middle English had usually the 
long "O" sound, has in Modern English generally taken 
the "U" sound, sometimes long, as in "moon," but more 
frequently short as in "book," "look," "foot;" sometimes 
this double letter has the modern short "U" sound as in 
"blood." "O" is largely used in diphthongal combina- 
tions, some of which have been referred to in connection 
with the other vowels, and which express various modifica- 
tions of the "O" and "U" sounds. Thus "OA" has two 
"O" sounds, as in "load" and "broad;" "OE," also has 
two sounds, one "O" and one "U," as "roe" and "does;" 
"01" or "OY" has the sound we use in "toil" and "boy;" 



146 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

while "OU" and "OW" express indiscriminately four 
"U" sounds and two "O" sounds, as "sound," "cow," 
"through," "could," "young," "ought," "though," 
"low." 

"U" retains its pure. Old English sounds in a compara- 
tively few words, as "rule," long and "put," short, those 
sounds having generally been given over to double "O," 
as "cool," "look," which spelling, however, generally 
represents Old English long "O," and has been already 
discussed in connection with that letter. The long "U" 
in Modern English is generally preceded by a palatal " Y' 
sound, as in "use," "tribute," "cute," "duty," "fury," 
"ague," "hue," "mute," "nuisance," "pure," "tune," 
"azure." It will be noticed that this list includes one 
example of the sound with "U" initial, and one with each 
of the consonants except, "J," "K," "L," "Q," "R," 
" S, " " V, " and " W. " In the case of all these exceptions 
but "K" and "V," it is physically difficult, if not impos- 
sible, to insert the "Y" sound. There is an instance of the 
sound with "K," in the word "kuklux," which is an 
Americanism of historical interest and importance, but 
hardly yet to be recognized as anything better than a use- 
ful bit of slang. In unaccented syllables followed by "E, " 
"LU" may have this "Y" sound, as in the word "value." 
Otherwise, as in "lure," "lute," the pure "U" sound is 
retained. In the examples with "G," "H," and "N," 
the "U" is followed by another vowel, "E" or "I;" but 
in all these cases examples may be given of the simple 
"U" with the "Y" insertion; thus, "gules," "human," 
"numismatic." With different spellings we get the same 
sound in "dew," "few," "hew," "mew," "pew," "Teu- 
ton," "view." When the "TU" combination occurs in 
words of more than one syllable, in an unaccented syllable 






THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 147 

following the accented, the sound becomes "CHU," as in 
"nature," "statuary," pronounced "nachur," "stachu- 
ary;" but when the preceding syllable is unaccented the 
sound is "Y," as "investiture," "gratitude," sounded 
"investityure," "gratityude." Modern English has de- 
veloped a new sound for short "U, " apparently a medial 
sound between old short "O" and "U;" the sound heard 
in "cut," "but," and spelled with "O," in "son," "ton." 
When it stands for Old English " Y, " as in " bury, " "busy," 
"buy," it varies according to the development of the 
word through the Middle English forms, standing for 
Modern short "E," short "I," and long "I," respectively. 

"W," showing by its name its origin in a doubled "U" 
or "V," is generally a consonant in Modern English as in 
Old; but a weak consonant often passing into the quality 
of a vowel. In Modern English this vowel sound of "W" 
is always associated with another vowel and varies accord- 
ing to the vowel with which it is associated. Thus we 
have "AW" in "law;" "EW," in "flew," "stew;" "OW," 
sometimes a "U" sound as in "how," and in other cases 
an "O" sound as in "blow." 

: 'Y," also, is frequently used as a consonant, taking the 
place of Old English palatal "G," and sometimes of "J," 
or of "I," when used before another vowel. As a vowel, 
: 'Y" cannot be distinguished from "I," having already 
in Middle English lost its Old English function of express- 
ing the Umlaut "U." It invariably replaces "I" at the 
end of a word, and variably in other positions. 

The diphthongs and digraphs have been almost all con- 
sidered in connection with the different vowels; but it may 
be well to treat them separately, that the omissions may 
be as few as possible, and for convenience of reference. 

"AI," in a number of words has the Modern long "A" 



148 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

sound, and serves to distinguish in spelling between words 
of identical sound; as in "bait," "bate;" "gait," gate," 
"pain," "pane," "rain," "rein," "r<eign;" "sail," "sale," 
"vain," "vane," "vein;" "wain," "wane." Before "R" 
the sound of "AI" is like "E" in "there;" as in "air," 
" fair. " In " aisle " it has the Modern long " I " sound. 

"AU," in words from Old English which had the "OH" 
spelling, as "daughter," Old English "dohter," and in 
some other instances as "author," has the broad sound 
of "OA;" where it stands for a nasalized "A," as in 
"aunt," "haunt," "gaunt," the sound is the pure original 
long "A" as "father;" though in the more familiar words 
of this class the tendency in America is to shorten and flat 
the sound. In words of recent French and German deriva- 
tion, the digraph retains the sound belonging to the 
original language; as "hautboy," "sauerkraut." It 
never occurs at the end of a word, the sound in such 
cases being represented by "AW." 

"AY" is mainly used to replace "AI" at the end of 
words, and in that place has the modern long "A" sound; 
as "delay. " In the particle of assent "ay, " the emphatic 
"yes," it has the sound of Modern long "I." 

"EA" has generally the Modern long "E" sound; as 
in "fear," "teach;" in a number of cases it takes the 
sound of short "E;" as in "bread," "dead," and the 
preterite "read" as distinguished from the present "read, " 
where it has the usual long "E" sound. Before "R" it 
has sometimes the sound of "E" in "there," as already 
referred to in the case of the verb "tear." It has also, in 
the word "heart" the original broad "A" sound; it has 
also, in a number of words, the "U" sound; as in "learn," 
"search," the last three sounds all when "R" follows. 
Down, at least, to the time of the poet Cowper, "EA" 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 149 

was used for the original long "E, " the Modern long "A" 
sound, as appears from many rhymes; for instance in 
' ' Alexander Selkirk : ' ' 

"I am monarch of all I survey, 
My realm there is none to dispute, 
From the centre all round to the sea, 
I am Lord of the fowl and the brute. " 



"EI" has three sounds: in words of Old English or of 
French derivation the modern pronunciation is sometimes 
Old long "E," Modern long "A;" as "eight," "feign," 
"vein;" it is not too much to claim that this is the histori- 
cal pronunciation; but in words of French origin where 
"C" preceded, as "deceive," "perceive," and in the usual 
American pronunciation of "either," "neither," the sound 
is that of Modern long "E, " Old long "I. " British usage 
sanctions the modern long "I" sound in these last two 
words, and later American usage among public speakers 
shows a tendency to follow the British. This modern 
long "I" sound is found, also, in a few words of Greek, 
German or Norse origin; as "eidolon," "eider duck." 

"EO" has in one instance the sound of Modern long 
"E," Old long "I;" as in "people;" and in another the 
sound of long "O;" as in "yeoman." 

"EU, " in most instances stands for the Greek "EU, " 
as in the words "eulogy, " "euphony, " and a large number 
of such derivatives, mostly technical; in all these it has the 
Modern sound of long "U" with the "Y" sound preceding. 

"EW" has the sound of Modern long "U" in such 
words as "dew," "few," "pew." 

"EY," at the end of words and unaccented has the 



150 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

sound of short "I;" as "monkey," "alley;" when ac- 
cented or in monosyllables it varies between modern long 
"E" as in "key," and modern long "A" as in "they." 

"IE" has the modern long "E" sound in nouns like 
"chief," "thief" and verbs like "grieve," "believe;" it 
has the modern long "I" sound in monosyllables like 
"die," "pie" and in the preterites and participles and the 
third person singular present indicative of verbs in "Y;" 
as "cry," "cried," "cries;" "try," "tried," "tries." 

"OA" has the two sounds; long "O," as in "boat," 
and broad "O" or "A," as in "broad," "oar." 

"OE" sounds like long "O," as in "doe," or like short 
modern "U, " as in "does." 

"01" and "OY" always express the diphthongal sound 
familiar in the words "hoist" and "boy;" the "Y" being 
invariably used when final. 

"OU" stands commonly for the diphthongal sound like 
that of German "AU, " a purely modern sound in English; 
as in "our," "house;" often in later French derivatives 
it has the sound of long "U;" as in "tour," "route;" 
when combined with "GH" it expresses a great variety 
of sounds; as (1) long "O" in "though;" (2) short broad 
"O" in "cough" and (3) the same sound lengthened in 
"thought;" (4) long "U" in "through;" (5) short "U" 
in "rough." 

"OW" varies between long "O" in monosyllables like 
"flow," "row" and the final syllable of words like "fol- 
low," "bellow," and the diphthongal "AU" in other 
monosyllables like "cow," "row," (with a different mean- 
ing from the similar word with the long "O" sound), and 
in the accented syllable of words like "flower," "shower." 

"UE" stands generally in words of French derivation 
for the long "U" with the semi-vowel "Y" preceding; 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 151 

as in "revenue," "value," but is sometimes silent as in 
tongue and the words in "ogue, " which the "Simplified 
Spelling Board" advise us to spell without the useless 
ending. 

"UI," in similar derivatives stands for the pure long 
"U" as "fruit," "suit;" but in at least one instance has 
the semi-vowel preceding, as "nuisance." 

Taking up the consonant sounds in their order, "B" 
calls for nb special comment, as its use has been substan- 
tially the same at all periods of the language. 

"C" retains its Old English "K" sound before the 
vowels "A," "O," and "U," but before the other vowels 
it generally stands for the voiceless "S;" as "center," 
"city," "cynic," this being distinctly a French usage in- 
troduced during the Middle English period. When the 
last letter of a syllable, or when preceding "L," "R" or 
"T," it keeps the old "K" sound; as "cling," "critic," 
"act;" the custom of emphasizing this hard sound of final 
"C" by adding a "K" to it in certain words is going out 
of use. Thus "musick" and similar spellings are seldom 
seen now. Combined with "H" this letter gives Modern 
English one of its peculiar sounds in such words as 
"church," "china," "cheese;" but when standing for the 
Greek letter "X," "Chi," in words derived from that 
language this "CH" has the "K" sound; as "chorus," 
" Christian. » 

"D" remains in English spelling in a number of words 
where the pronunciation is "T." This occurs when the 
tendency to omit the "E" of the preterite and participle 
termination of such words as "bless," "blessed," "look," 
"looked," brings the "D" of the suffix next to a surd or 
voiceless consonant. It is a physical impossibility to 
pronounce such a combination as " SD " or " KD. " Either 



152 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the "S" must be changed to "Z" and the "K" to "G" 
or "H," or the "D" must be changed to "T." "ST" and 
"KT" are perfectly easy to sound. The language has 
invariably made this change in the pronunciation, under 
the circumstances supposed above; but the spelling has 
not kept pace with the pronunciation. We pronounce 
"lookt," but we spell "looked." This is certainly a clear 
case for the spelling reformer. 

"F," in modern use, has generally the surd or voiceless 
sound; as in "for," "if," "rift," When final, in some 
cases, it has the voiced, or sonant sound; as in "of," but 
in many cases where it had that sound in Old English 
Modern English uses "V;" as "over," Old English "ofer." 

"G" is a letter which has had great vicissitudes in 
English use. Modern English drops entirely its palatal 
" Y" sound, frequent in Old English and not lost in Middle 
English. It has in general the two sounds: hard "G" of 
words like "go," with its nasal variation in the "NG" 
combination in words like "strong," "linger;" and soft 
"G" or "DGH," a French influence product, in words 
like "genuine," "engine." Unlike "C" in this respect, 
"G" retains the old hard sound generally before "E" 
and "I" in words of Old English origin, as "get," "give." 
"G" is the letter which of all the English alphabet, unless 
perhaps "H," wastes the most ink. It stands for "F" 
in certain words where it is combined with "H, " as 
"cough," "laugh;" and it is silent before "N" in a num- 
ber of words like "sign," "reign;" and in many instances 
where it represents with "H " the Old English "H. " The 
manifold confusion wrought in English pronunciation 
and spelling by this mischievous "GH" combination 
deserves a paragraph of scolding, which, however, would 
not be appropriate to such a work as this is supposed to be. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 153 

Here is a nearly complete list of separate sounds associated 
with this combination: "laugh," laff; "caught," cawt; 
"eight," ate; "height," hite; "right," rite; "though," 
tho; "ought," awt; "cough," cawf; "through," thru; 
"bough," bow; "rough," ruf; the combination, then, in 
three cases stands for "F, " and in the eight others is 
silent. It cannot be said to determine even the quantity 
of the preceding syllable, or vowels, since exactly the same 
conditions give in some cases the long vowel and in others 
the short; as "though," "cough," "through," "rough." 

In regard to "H" ttere are some interesting points in 
Modern English usage. It has entirely lost its value at 
the end of syllables, or in combination with "L" and "R, " 
with both of which it was sounded in Old English, as 
"hring," "hlinc. " It continues to be sounded when 
combined with "W," but the spelling places it after, while 
the pronunciation clearly puts it before, in Modern, as it 
was in Old and Middle English. "What," for example, 
is properly sounded "hwat;" though there is a tendency, 
more noticeable in England than in America, to drop out 
the "H" in the pronunciation of words of this class, say- 
ing "wen," "wite, " etc., instead of "hwen," or "hwite." 
"H" is used in combination with "T" as a substitute for 
the Old English Thet, " 3, " which had already disappeared 
in Chaucer's time, and for its equivalent, the Thorn letter, 
"J)," which was then still infrequently used. With "C" 
it expresses the softened sound of Old English "C" or 
"K," which might be phonetically suggested by "tch," 
and which is sometimes spelled with those letters, as in 
"catch" and similar words. This sound came into the 
language in the Middle English period, as an effect of the 
French "SH" sound of "CH," which we find in words of 
French derivation like "machine" or "chivalry." The 



154 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

struggle between this sound and Old English "K" resulted 
in the " CH " of "church, " and many similar words. The 
sound of "H" appears in Modern English in a number of 
instances where it is not recognized in the spelling. Thus, 
before "U" in "sure," "nature," and similar combina- 
tions, in the latter of which the "T" of the last syllable is 
changed to "CH" in the pronunciation. A similar intru- 
sion of the "H" sound occurs before "10" in words with 
the Latin termination "tion," which syllable is sounded 
as if written "shun;" as in "nation;" also before "IA, " 
in words like "ingratiate," "vitiate." These instances 
of the use of "H" in the pronunciation where it does not 
appear in the spelling, may partially compensate for the 
many cases where it appears in the spelling but is not 
sounded at all. The cases of silent "H" in combination 
with "G" have been already considered; but there are a 
number of others. Latin-French derivatives generally 
follow the French rule in this respect; as "hour," 
"honest," "honour," and many others. The confusion, 
in this matter, caused by the fact that the educated classes 
in the later Middle English and early Modern English 
periods, tried to discriminate between French-Latin, 
and direct Latin derivatives, sounding the "H" in the 
latter, as in the word "habit," is seen in the occasional 
occurrence of such spellings as " habundant, " and prob- 
ably accounts for the wide spread so-called "cockney" 
confusion as to the use of "H" in English pronunciation 
among the uneducated. 

"J," in Old English simply another way of writing "I," 
is consistently used in Modern English for the "DGH" 
sound which we call soft "G." It appears for the most 
part in Latin derivatives, such as "justice," "injury," 
etc., the sound being generally spelled with "G" when it 
comes through French. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 155 

"K," very little used in Old English, has come to be 
the standard expression for the old hard sound of "C," 
being invariably used before "E," "I," and "Y," and 
generally when the sound is medial or final. 

The letters "L," "M," "N," "P," have been used for 
substantially the same sounds at all periods of the English 
language; but they all appear in modern spelling where 
they are silent in the pronunciation; as "could," "mne- 
monics," "hymn," "pneumonia;" in three of these four 
examples it is to be noted that the silent letter indicates 
the Greek derivation of the words. 

"Q, " introduced with the other French novelties in the 
Middle English Period, has attained a wide use in modern 
spelling; though it is difficult to see what useful purpose 
it serves. For some reason it cannot stand alone, always 
appearing supported by "U. " Initially this combination 
stands for Old English "CW," in such words as "queen," 
"quick," Old English "cwen," "cwic;" medially and 
finally it represents "K, " and may generally be taken 
to show French derivation; as, in "conquer," "pictur- 
esque. " 

"R" has lost the "H" sound which in some Old English 
words preceded it, and has lost also in general usage the 
trill which probably was at one time usual, but which 
remains as a Northern English and Scotch dialectal varia- 
tion. The resulting "R" sound, when the trill is gone, has 
proved to be a weak one frequently vanishing in ordinary 
conversation. An American vulgarism, corresponding to 
the British confusion as to "H," is the loss of "R" when 
final and when occurring before another consonant; as 
"war" pronounced "waw," and "horse" pronounced 
"haws" or "hoss;" and its intrusion at the end of words 
ending in a vowel sound, as "law" pronounced "lor." 



156 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

There is a real difficulty in the way of the preservation 
of the "R" sound without the trill; and the varying de- 
grees of success with which this difficulty is met in various 
localities constitutes a perceptible dialectal distinction, even 
among educated and cultivated people. 

"S" has given its work in both its main divisions of 
service to other letters, its voiceless sibilant sound being 
frequently written with "C," and the voiced or sonant 
with "Z." Disregarding these, there remain a number of 
cases where the letter "S" is used for one or other of these 
two sounds. Initial "S" generally "has the sharp or voice- 
less sound; as "so," "sing;" final and medial "S," with 
more numerous exceptions, has the voiced or "Z" sound; 
as "his," "dismal;" the most frequent exceptions being 
those cases where a surd letter precedes; as "sleeps," 
"puts." As already noticed under "H," "S" is likely to 
combine with a "u" or "io" following to make the "sh" 
sound; as "sure," "passion." Double "S" usually indi- 
cates the voiceless sound; as "hiss," "bliss;" but there 
are a few exceptions, as "dissolve," where the sonants 
"D" and "V," though not in immediate contact, may by 
their nearness have influenced the sound; and "possess," 
in which the sonant sound may be given to the first doublet 
in an unconscious avoidance of the intolerable hissing ef- 
fect which would be produced by giving the sharp sound 
to both. Altogether the frequency of this sibilant "S" 
in Modern English is from the standpoint of euphony 
one of its greatest defects; and gives force to the supposed 
saying of Emperor Charles V. that when talking with 
ladies he used Italian but reserved English for geese. 

The remaining sounds may be dismissed briefly as all 
have been considered in connection with those already 
specified. Thus in regard to "T" we have seen how it 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 157 

tends to give way to "ch" and "sh;" "V" generally 
represents the sonant sound of "F" in words of Old Eng- 
lish origin; as "over," Old English "ofer, " or "even," 
Old English "aefen;" and stands for the same sound 
when brought directly into English from Latin or French; 
as "vigor," "vine." "W," much more used than in 
Old English, has stood for the same sound at all periods. 
" Y, " as a consonant takes the place of Old English palatal 
"G" in such words as "year," Old English "gear;" 
"day," Old English "daeg," and is sounded though not 
spelled, with "u," "ia," and "io;" as "refuse," "in- 
ebriate," "victorious." "Z" is, in Modern English, the 
standard sign for the sonant or voiced "S;" though that 
sound is still frequently expressed by "S." "Z," like 
"S" and "T," combines with the "Y" sound of a long 
"U" following to make a sound imperfectly expressed by 
its combination with "h;" as in "azure." "X" is largely 
used in words from Latin to give the sound of two con- 
sonants: "cs," "ks," "gs," or to represent Old Eng- 
lish "hs;" as "express," "exert." In a few words of 
Greek derivation, "X" has initially the sound of "Z;" as 
"xylophone," and the familiar historical names "Xerxes," 
and "Xenophon. " Recent editions of the dictionaries 
give along list of technical terms beginning with "X," 
and having presumably the "Z" sound. 

It will* be noticed that in this somewhat protracted 
discussion, more attention has been given to spelling than 
to actual pronunciation. The important changes in the 
sounds of English, in the Modern Period are after all not 
numerous. The language remains, in this respect, very 
much as it was left by the working of the French influences 
of the Middle English Period upon the material of the Old 
English speech. The umlaut "u" of Old English and 



158 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

the peculiar Middle English sound of "eu," "ew," 
have been lost, and the modern long "i," the short "u" 
of words like "cut," the broad "o," and the open diph- 
thong "ou" have come into use. The intrusion of the 
"y" before "u," and the similar intrusion of "h," 
"sh" and "ch" before "u," "ia" and "io," the de- 
velopment and wide use of the soft "g" and the "ch" 
sounds and the complete elimination of the guttural or 
palatal use of "g" and "h:" these are the most impor- 
tant consonantal changes. When we have considered the 
great vowel shift, which after all is merely a change in the 
use of letters, we find that the changes are mainly a matter 
of spelling. The shifts, repetitions, substitutions, and 
variations in the use of the letters are innumerable and 
exasperating. If the account of these things seems like 
an argument for spelling reform it is simply the inevitable 
effect of the statement of the facts. There has been no 
intention to construct such an argument. The process 
of unconscious development has resulted in inextricable 
confusion. From the standpoint of history there is very 
little to be said for Modern English spelling. A radical 
reform in the direction of phonetic spelling would be much 
nearer the logical historical growth than the present 
idiotic confusion; which seems to represent the ignorance 
of the uneducated populace misinterpreted and mis- 
directed by the pedantry of the makers of dictionaries. 



CHAPTER XII 

Period of Modern English. Grammar. 

THE changes which have resulted in the very 
simple declensions of the Modern English noun, 
have been mainly the outcome of three tenden- 
cies which are themselves different manifesta- 
tions of the one tendency toward simplicity and uniform- 
ity, with the substitution of prepositions for inflectional 
terminations. This process had already gone very far in 
the Middle English period, and the story, since, is mainly 
that of its continuation and completion. The first of 
these tendencies is the weakening of the vowels "A," 
"0," "U," to the vowel "E," or rather to a sound like 
that of the usual unaccented pronunciation of that vowel 
in the definite article. If we notice our own pronuncia- 
tion when we speak hurriedly or carelessly, we cannot 
fail to observe that this tendency is common to us all. 
In the ordinary unstudied speech of the average person, 
all unaccented vowels have the sound of "A" in "stel- 
lar," "E" in "filter," "O" in the last syllable of "color," 
and "U" in "leisure." "Y" and "I" seem to have 
more power of maintaining themselves when unstressed; 
but the others when uttered rapidly and without stress 
all have a substantially identical sound. A carefully 
accurate speaker, in public address, may distinguish be- 
tween the "E" of "filter" and the "A" of "stellar," 
but in ordinary conversation very few do so. This ten- 
dency has had much to do with the change in English 

159 



160 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

declensions. In Middle English these vowels, "A," "O," 
"U," in the final syllable of almost all nouns when not 
accented, are represented by the letter "E." This is 
the meaning of the final "E" which strikes every one who 
reads Chaucer as so peculiar and so characteristic. Take 
for example the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales: 

"Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote 
The droughte of Marche hath perced to the rote 

And smale foules maken melodie 

That slepen al the night with open ye. " 

The "es" of "shoures" would have been "urn" accord- 
ing to Old English usage and so with the final "e" of 
"sote." Old English would not have needed, and proba- 
bly would not have used any preposition, which is made 
necessary in Middle and Modern by the assimilation of 
the Dative-Instrumental form to that of the Nominative- 
Accusative plural. According to Old English usage 
"Marche" would have been used without the preposition. 
"Rote," as a Dative of the "O" declension, would have 
had the same form. "Fules" would have been "fuglas, " 
and "ye," "eagan," in both the change from "a" to 
"e" being illustrated. In Modern English this final "e" 
has generally disappeared, and even when it remains in 
the spelling is in most cases disregarded in the pronuncia- 
tion. 

A second tendency which has left a strong impression 
in the changes in the declension forms is to drop the final 
consonants "n," in the inflected cases of the "Weak" 
nouns, and "m" in the Dative plurals of all declensions 
so far as they have come down to modern times. "Ye" 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 161 



in the above selection appears sometimes as "eyne," but 
modern usage assimilates it to the general form, as "eyes. " 

A third tendency is to assimilate or level all inflections 
to the one "s" or "es" retained from the Old English 
"O" declension. As the weakening of the vowels to 
"e," and the dropping of final "n" and "m," in the 
inflections of the "O" nouns, left "s" and "es" as the 
only inflectional forms of that declension, the tendency was 
to bring nouns of all other declensions to this form. The 
eight "Umlaut" nouns resisted this tendency as to the 
plural; and so did a very few other nouns; but its effect 
was so sweeping that other forms in Modern English must 
be treated as exceptions. The table below will illustrate 
the working of these tendencies: 

The Nominative plural forms of words of the four chief 
declensions were: 

O. A. Weak. Umlaut. 

Stanas Cara Naman Bee 
By the weakening of 



"a" to "e" we 










get: 


Stanes 


Care 


Namen 


Bee 


Dropping final "n" 










gives: 


Stanes 


Care 


Name 


Bee 


Assimilation gives: 


Stanes 


Cares 


Names 


Boces 


Later changes in spell- 










ing give : 


Stones 


Cares 


Names 


Books 



Some irregular plurals in Modern English may be ac- 
counted for by the survival, in these instances, of old 
grammatical forms. Thus we use "horse" as a plural 
when speaking of a troop of horse, or of so many "horse" 
power. In Old English the word was neuter of the "0" 
declension, and its Nominative- Accusative plural had the 
same form as the singular. 



/ 



162 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

The word "deor," in Old English, was used for any 
sort of a wild animal, corresponding to German "thier;" 
and was a neuter noun of the "0" declension, having its 
plural Nominative-Accusative the same as the singular. 
For some reason this word, while changing its meaning to 
express only the one kind of animal which it now names, 
has kept the unchanged form of the plural; and we now 
say one, two, three, or any number of "deer," never 
"deers." The same is true of "sheep," from Old Eng- 
lish "sceap;" and of "swine," from Old English "swm." 
Most of the Middle English plurals in "en," preserving 
the Old English "Weak" N plural in "an," have been 
brought into conformity with the general rule in Modern 
English; as "yen," "eyes;" "fon," "foes;" "shon," 
"shoes;" but there remains one clear example of this form 
in general modern usage; "ox," "oxen;" and a few others 
which look like it, but are examples of the singular con- 
fusion of historical elements which sometimes results from 
the general tendency to change. Thus "brethren," a 
form which is not infrequently used instead of the more 
familiar "brothers," preserves the Umlaut found in the 
Old English declension of the word, and adds to it the 
"en" of the "Weak" declension, with which the Old 
English word had no connection. So the word "child," 
in Old English "cild," plural "cildru," keeps its Middle 
English form for the plural, softening the hard "c" to 
"ch," and substituting for the Old English "u," the 
utterly illogical "Weak" form "en." 

The borrowing of words from foreign languages has led, 
in a number of instances, to the use of foreign plural forms. 
There is, indeed, a strong tendency, thoroughly wholesome 
and to be encouraged, though no individual can safely 
Undertake to hurry the historical process much in such 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 163 

matters, to assimilate these forms to the English; and this 
tendency leads in some cases to uncertainty and confusion. 
A number of Latin plurals, for example, are in common 
use, and ignorance or forgetfulness of their origin some- 
times leads to unfortunate blunders in connection with 
them. One of these is the neuter plural in "a," for Latin 
words whose Nominative-Accusative singular was in 
"urn;" as "data," which is sometimes ignorantly or 
carelessly used as if it were in the singular. So we have 
the word "species," which in the original Latin and in 
English alike, has the same form for singular and plural. 
Ignorance, or forgetfulness, leads sometimes to the creation 
of a singular form "specie," as in the vulgar phrase "a 
specie of animals," where the word is confused with 
"specie," meaning coined money, an entirely different 
word, having no plural. There are a number of words 
from Latin, ending in "ex," whose Latin plural would 
be "ices," in regard to which there is in English a con- 
fused or a divided usage. Sometimes both forms might be 
used with a convenient distinction in the meaning. Thus 
in the use of the word "index," the Latin form "indices" 
might be reserved for the meaning "indications," and the 
English "indexes" kept to the other sense of a complete 
alphabetical table of contents. The usual practice, how- 
ever, is to use the two forms indifferently, though as in 
most such cases the English form "indexes," is rapidly 
gaining ground, and is certainly to be preferred. Greek 
neuters in "on," like the Latin in "um," had their 
plurals in " a, " and some of these are much used English 
words; as "automaton," "automata;" "phenomenon," 
"phenomena." So Latin feminines in "a" have their 
plural in "ae;" as "formula," "formulae;" but this 
word has in recent years been coming into more familiar 



164 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

use, and there is a strong tendency to give its plural the 
English form "formulas." In general it may be said 
that in order to use these words with certainty and pre- 
cision, one must keep in mind their origin, a requirement 
which illustrates the fact that a good knowledge of French, 
Latin, and Greek, is essential to a scholarly knowledge 
and use of English; but that in cases of really divided 
usage between the foreign and the native forms, the prefer- 
ence should generally be given to the English. It is a 
sign of incomplete education, not of real scholarship, to 
have one's talk or one's writing full of Greek, Latin, or 
French forms or words. 

As to the cases of the nouns, Modern English really 
retains them all; but depends for the most part on the 
prepositions to indicate them and their relations. In the 
Genitive, or Possessive case, there is a divided usage, the 
preposition showing a tendency to displace the Possessive 
form. Thus a rule is given in some text books on Rhetoric, 
to this effect : use the Possessive form only with the names 
of persons. According to this it would be correct to write 
"John's hat," but not "the cat's fur;" the proper rhetori- 
cal phrase, in the latter case, being "the fur of the cat." 
Like many other rhetorical rules, or attempts at them, 
Rhetoric being a subject governed by general principles 
which can not well be put into definite regulations, this is 
manifestly absurd. Good English usage permits the pos- 
sessive form wherever the writer finds it convenient. The 
use or disuse of it is as yet a matter of style, not jof gram- 
matical correctness. 

In Middle English some of the Genitive forms of some 
declensions other than the "0" may be discovered, though 
in rather veiled form; as "our Lady grace," "our Lady's 
grace, " where the form " Lady " is explained as an abridged 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 165 

feminine genitive; but in Modern English all trace of any- 
thing but the "s" "es" of the "O" declension has dis- 
appeared. Where it would be very awkward to use this, 
as when the stem of the noun ends in "s," or in the plural 
generally, and when the use of the preposition is undesir- 
able, the genitive or possessive is indicated by the apos- 
trophe, rather a poor makeshift for an inflection, and 
likely to vanish in ordinary usage. 

Our modern grammars use the word "Objective," for 
the Dative, Accusative and Instrumental cases; but all 
these cases exist, because the laws of thought require 
them, and are indicated by the mutual relation of the 
words in the sentence, and by the use of prepositions. 
Thus in the sentence, "I sent the book to my friend by 
express," "book" is in the Accusative, "friend" in the 
Dative, and "express" in the Instrumental case, though 
these words all have the same inflectional form. 

In the Demonstrative Pronoun, Modern English retains 
the forms "this" and "that," using them substantially 
as they were used in Middle English, with entire disregard 
of Gender, and with no declension in the singular. For 
the corresponding plural forms we have "these" and 
"those," whose etymology gives the students of language 
a highly entertaining, but very perplexing game of hide 
and seek. "These," by its vowel suggests a derivation 
from the Old English masculine singular "3es;" but as 
we have seen, the Middle English form corresponding, to 
"these" was "thise;" and the change of spelling from 
"I" to "E, " to make spelling and sound agree would not 
be strange in the transition from Middle to Modern Eng- 
lish; whereas the change from "E" to "I" in the transi- 
tion from Old to Middle has no analogy to support it, and 
is not so easily accepted. The probable process, then was 



166 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

"3is," "this," pluralized in Middle English to "thise," 
and spelling changed in Modern English to "these." 
"Those," also, is a puzzling form as to etymology. The 
vowel "O," suggests derivation from the Middle English 
"tho," which corresponds to the Old English "3a;" but 
the form of "those" is almost precisely that of Old Eng- 
lish "3as," with the normal changes from Old to Modern 
pronunciation and spelling. The former etymology, how- 
ever, has the advantage of keeping the use and meaning of 
the two pronouns consistent with the Old English; "this" 
and "these" having the same meaning as "3is" and 
"3as," while "that" and "those" correspond in the 
same way to Old English " 3aet, " and " 3a. " 

It is probable, as was noted in the chapter on Old Eng- 
lish Grammar, that Modern English "them," used both 
for Demonstrative and Personal Objective plural, may be 
derived from "3aem," the Dative-Instrumental plural of 
Old English "se," "that;" but "they," and "their," 
can not be traced to the corresponding forms of Old Eng- 
lish. There are no etymological laws to explain a change 
from "3a" to "they," or from "3ara" to "their." 
Etymologists have been driven therefore to seek an origin 
for these words in Danish, where are found the forms 
'"3ei," '3eir," with meanings corresponding to modern 
"they" and "their." Such an adaptation from Danish 
is not at all improbable. 

In the Personal Pronoun the modern forms show a 
singular confusion as compared with Old English, though 
most of the changes occurred during the Middle English 
Period. As compared with Middle English, the following 
are some of the more important changes : Prepositions are 
used freely to indicate the Genitive, Accusative and 
Dative-Instrumental cases, there being no inflectional 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 167 

distinction between the Dative-Instrumental and Accusa- 
tive. " I, " always written with the capital letter, is estate 
lished in usage for the first person singular. "My" has 
become the usual Genitive or Possessive, the form "mine " 
which represents the Middle English Possessive "mm," 
being limited, in ordinary prose, to use in the predicate 
relation, as "it is mine;" but being found as an archaic 
form in poetic or otherwise heightened language, as "mine 
honour;" this use being found most often when the follow- 
ing word begins with a vowel or with silent " h. " " Our, " 
corresponding to the Middle English Possessive "oure, " 
has simply dropped the final "e" of the older word, but 
has a changed pronunciation which is found in most of the 
familiar words in "ou. " In the second person, Middle 
English "thou" has become archaic, and is used only in 
the language of poetry or devotion, or when the attempt 
is made to reproduce the quality of medieval speech. The 
same may be said of "thy " and " thine. " " You, " " your" 
and "yours," have taken the place of these pronouns in 
ordinary speech and in prose Literature, by the prevalence 
of the courtesy usage which refuses to address another 
person directly, a usage which with some interesting varia- 
tions is found in most modern languages. The use of 
"thou" and "thee" by the "Friends," in what they call 
the "plain language," was probably in its origin a protest 
against formality in speech, but the formality has now 
become universal, and the plain language is rapidly passing 
away, and remains in use only among a very few. "Thee " 
was in Middle English, and still is, if correctly used, an 
Objective form. The "Quaker" use of it in the Nomina- 
tive, has no sanction in historical Grammar. Middle 
English "y e " remains correct English for the Nominative 
plural; but has like "thou" and "thee," been dropped 



168 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

from conversation or ordinary prose, its place being taken 
by "you." This change is a comparatively recent one. 
The older correct use may be illustrated by a sentence 
from the King James Bible: "I tell you nay, but except 
ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. " In the third per- 
son, Modern English discards the "H" of "hit," which 
still lingered in the Middle English period. It is interest- 
ing to note that "hit" is still used in the dialect of the 
mountaineers of the central southern states of America, 
a people who are known to be of very pure English stock; 
but whether this is a survival of the Old English form, or 
like other misuses of "H" a more recent cockney ism, is 
hard to decide. From the neuter, in its modern form "it, " 
Modern English has constructed a new Genitive, "its," 
which did not get into general use until the seventeenth 
century, Shakespeare and the King James Bible still com- 
monly employing "his" for the neuter Genitive. "Her" 
and "him" show very slight change from the Middle 
English "hir" and "hym." Modern English adds to 
Middle English Nominative plural "they" the correspond- 
ing form, also probably of Norse origin, "their," for the 
Possessive; and for the Middle English "hem" in the 
Objective plural substitutes the word "them," prob- 
ably derived from the Old English Dative plural Demon- 
strative "9aem. " The word "she," which appeared in 
Middle English, taking the place of Old English "heo," 
is probably also a transference of an old feminine Demon- 
strative "seo, " to the uses of a personal pronoun. Out 
of the numerous declension forms of the Old English 
Interrogatives, Modern English retains a few; and uses 
some of them as Interrogatives, some as Relatives and 
some as either or both according to circumstances. Thus 
to "which" the representative of the old Interrogative 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 169 

"hwilc," modern usage assigns the distributive service 
of the old "hwae3er," as in the phrase "which of the 
two," by which the modern writer would express the idea 
of the old phrase, found as late as the King James version, 
"whether of them twain." To this word "which," to- 
gether with the Demonstrative "that," are now given 
the functions of the neuter relative. This distinction was 
not made until after the date of the English Bible and 
Shakespeare, as will be clear from the phrase of the Lord's 
prayer, still generally used, "Our Father which art in 
Heaven," where the word "which" is plainly used as a 
masculine relative. "What," the representative of Old 
English "hwaet, " the neuter Interrogative, is now used 
indiscriminately as to gender when the noun it qualifies is 
expressed, in other words, when used as an adjective, as 
"what man," "what woman," "what thing." When 
used alone, however, it is understood of the neuter, while 
"who" is used for persons, whether as Interrogative or 
Relative, without distinction of gender. Thus: "who 
was that man or that woman, and what did he or she 
say?" or "The man or the woman who did the task that 
I wished done." The Indefinite Pronoun "one" and the 
Article have been sufficiently discussed in the previous 
chapters. The slight trace of declension which remains 
in Middle English in the final "e" of the "weak" Adjec- 
tive has quite disappeared in Modern English; and the 
comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs is essentially the 
same except the prevalence of the use of "more" and 
"most," frequent with the Adjective, and general with 
the Adverb. 

In the Ablaut or Gradation verbs, to which belong most 
of those called irregular in Modern English, we notice, 
besides changes in spelling and pronunciation common to 



170 THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 

all sorts of words, a few interesting developments. The 
second, or plural Preterite form has generally disappeared, 
remaining as irregularities in a few cases, as "sing," whose 
Preterite is sometimes "sung," but more usually "sang," 
and "bear," which has the two forms of Preterite: "bare" 
and "bore;" and persisting as solecisms in many other 
cases like "run" for "ran." The final "e" of the In- 
finitive, representing in Middle English the "an" of Old 
English, has generally been dropped, and is silent in the 
few cases, as "ride" and "choose," where it has been 
retained. The tendency to level useless distinctions shows 
itself in this word "choose," by the change of the old Pre- 
terite, "ceas," to "chose," making the vowel of Preter- 
ite and Past Participle the same. There are a number of 
illustrations of a similar levelling of the Preterite and Past 
Participle vowels, sometimes one and sometimes the other 
being retained for both. Various influences may account 
for the preference in these cases, the analogy or at- 
traction of similar forms in other words being per- 
haps as frequently as any other the most probable 
cause. A small group of verbs retain in Modern 
English the characteristics of the Reduplicating verb 
in Old English; at least to such a degree as to 
render them recognizable. "Fall," "fell," "fallen;" 
"grow," "grew," "grown;" "know," "knew," "known" 
are examples of these, the "ew" of the Preterite in the 
latter two standing for the "EO" Preterite of the Old 
English. The "Weak" verbs show a similar tendency 
to levelling so that the distinction among the three 
classes, which could be discerned in Middle English as to 
the first and second, is quite obliterated in Modern 
English. The prefix of the Past Participle, "ge" in Old 
English, "y " in Middle, has quite disappeared in Modern, 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 171 

the single exception being the archaic word "yclept," 
which still sometimes shows itself in poetry or romantic 
fiction. In the study of the Old English grammar atten- 
tion was called to the distinction between the Preterites 
in "D" and those in "T," due to the quality of the pre- 
ceding consonant, the surd, voiceless letters "F," "K, " 
"S," "P," "T," calling for the corresponding voiceless 
"T, " as "slepan," "slepte;" the sonant or voiced con- 
sonants, "B," "D," "G," "V," "Z," calling for the cor- 
responding voiced "D;" as "lecgan, " "lecgde." In 
most cases, however, in Old English, the vowels "E" or 
"O," were inserted before the sign of the Preterite, this 
being one of the distinctions between classes, and in these, 
the consonant was invariably "D." With the dropping 
of this inserted vowel, which has taken place almost in- 
variably in Modern English, as it is spoken, if not as it is 
written, the distinction between the "D" and "T" Pre- 
terite has become much more important. It can not be 
avoided because it grows out of the structure of the organs 
of speech, it being physically impossible to pronounce a 
voiced consonant immediately after a voiceless, or vice 
versa. One of the worst anomalies of modern spelling 
arises out of this matter. The tendency to drop out the 
inserted vowel has gone on in speech and the spelling has 
not kept pace with it. We spell "rob-bed but pronounce 
"robd;" we spell "lov-ed," but pronounce "lovd, " 
unless we are a certain type of clergyman reading the 
Bible; and what is far worse, we spell "slip-ped" and 
pronounce "slipt;" we spell "kiss-ed" and pronounce 
"kist;" we spell "look-ed," and pronounce "lookt." 
This, surely, is a very clear case for the spelling reformer. 
The general tendency to the levelling or assimilation of 
different forms has led, as one of its most important results, 



172 THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 

to the transfer of a large number of the "Strong," or as 
we now say the irregular verbs to the "Weak" or so-called 
regular conjugation. Old English "gliden," "glad," 
becomes "glide," "glided;" "creopan," "creap," be- 
comes "creep," "crept;" and so in many instances. 
The Strong Preterites remain in dialect use and are pre- 
ferred to the "Weak" often long after the latter have be- 
come universally accepted in the literary language or in 
conversation among the educated classes. "Crope" for 
"crept/' and "drug" for "dragged" are familiar illus- 
trations of this fact. "Strong" Preterites are used in Shake- 
speare and the King James Bible with some words which 
have since taken the "Weak" form. An illustration of 
this is the word "holpen," common in the Bible, where a 
modern writer would of course use "helped." In one 
instance the strong Preterite has remained in Modern 
English, when all other forms of the word have been lost; 
this is the word "quoth, " the modern form of Old English 
"cwa£>," Preterite of the "Strong" verb, "cwe3an," to 
speak. In some cases, where the stem of the word ends 
in "D " or "T, " it is difficult, especially in the much simpli- 
fied and unified modern forms, to distinguish whether the 
verb were originally "Weak" or "Strong." Thus Old 
English "berstan, " with its Preterite singular "baerst," 
Preterite plural "burston," and Past Participle "bur- 
sten," has been levelled down to "burst," "burst," 
"burst," though the tendency to the substitution of the 
"Weak" for the "Strong" conjugation, gives us the sole- 
cism "bursted," which is likely enough to become the 
accepted form. In some cases the Preterite Indicative 
has yielded to the levelling tendency, while the old "Strong" 
form remains in the Past Participle, though in these in- 
stances there is generally a divided usage, both "Strong" and 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 173 

"Weak" Participles being found in reputable usage. Thus 
we have "swell," "swelled," "swollen" or "swelled;" 
"load," "loaded," "laden" or "loaded;" in both of these 
cases the tendency is strong to drop the old "Strong" Par- 
ticiple and substitute the corresponding "Weak" form; and 
there are a number of instances of the two forms being used 
side by side, with no thought of impropriety in regard to 
either, the "Strong" form growing more and more unusual, 
however, as time passes on. Thus we have "melt," "melted," 
"molten," or "melted;" "shave," "shaved," "shaven" 
or "shaved;" "mow," "mowed," "mown" or "mowed;" 
"sow," "sowed," "sown" or "sowed." Analogy would 
seem to justify "blow," "blowed," "blown" or "blowed;" 
"grow," "growed," "grown" or "growed;" though the 
time does not appear to be ripe for these last two forms, 
and reputable use still insists upon the old Reduplicating 
Preterites in "grow," "grew," "grown;" "blow," "blew," 
"blown." Study of the history of language certainly 
tends to charity if not to tolerance in regard to such sole- 
cisms; as they are in many instances, likeTopsy's "growed" 
anticipations of that which is to be expected in the 
progress of a tendency; or, like the Yankee "dumb," 
survivals of an old form which was once entirely correct. 
In connection with the " Strong- Weak, " or "Preteritive- 
Present" verbs, as discussed in the Chapter on Old Eng- 
lish grammar, attention was called to the origin of the 
Biblical words "wot" and "wist." Another such word 
was "cunnan," meaning to "know," or "to be able;" the 
latter meaning having, perhaps, been derived from the 
former. Both meanings are found in Modern English in 
forms which may be traced more or less directly to this 
word. Its Present Indicative remains, practically un- 
changed, in "can;" the oldi Preterite, "Cu9e," has been 



174 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

changed, probably by the force of attraction, from the 
words "would" and "should," to "could;" its Past 
Participle "cu3" appears in our Adjective "uncouth," 
the historical meaning of which is "unknown," and there- 
fore strange or queer. "Shall," "may," and "must" all 
belong to this group of words; "shall" being the modern 
form of Old English "sceall," Preteritive Present from 
"sculan," to be under obligation, "to ought," whose 
" Weak " Preterite was " scolde, " from which plainly comes 
modern "should." "May" is the modern form of Old 
English "maeg," which had no known Infinitive, and 
whose "Weak" Preterite was "meahte," from which 
comes our "might." "Must" represents in modern 
speech, the Old English "Weak" Preterite "moste," 
whose Preteritive Present was "mot," a word still occa- 
sionally heard in the Masonic ritual, in the phrase "So 
mote it be. " This word has had a singular shift of mean- 
ing; its original sense was "to be allowed, or permitted," 
with no suggestion of obligation or compulsion. In its 
modern development it has curiously repeated the ancient 
process; using its secondary "Weak" Preterite "must," 
(ancient "moste"), in a Present Indicative sense. It 
would not be stranger than some of the changes which 
have already occurred, if future generations should make 
out of this word yet another "Weak" Preterite, writing 
"I musted," in the sense of "I was compelled." 

The original use of "willan" and "sculan" may afford 
a clew to the correct use of the words as auxiliaries, which 
to some people is one of the most perplexing points in 
Modern English usage. Speaking in the first person, 
when we know our own intentions as we cannot possibly 
know those of another, "will" connotes purpose; as "I 
will complete this task. " In the second and third persons 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 175 

where we cannot know the intention of the one addressed 
or spoken of, "will" connotes simple futurity, your opinion 
as to what is likely to happen hereafter; as, "They will 
have a good time on the picnic," or "You will sleep well 
tonight. " Speaking in the first person, where we do not 
like to admit obligation or authority," shall" connotes 
simple futurity; as, "I shall be in town tomorrow," or 
"We shall start at ten o'clock." Speaking in the second 
or third person where we are more or less accustomed to 
express authority, "shall" has its original sense of obliga- 
tion; as "You shall go," or "He shall pay." When we 
are willing to admit obligation we use the word "ought," 
or the circumlocution "Am under obligation," or other 
such phrase. The correct use is well suggested by the 
often quoted example of the incorrect: "I will drown, and 
nobody shall help me;" and the difficulty is very neatly 
illustrated in a passage in Barrie's novel, "When a Man's 
Single, " when the hero, a Scotchman, is asked by his em- 
ployer, "Have you ever got over the usual Scotch diffi- 
culty with 'shall' and 'will?'" and replies innocently, 
"No, and I never will. " 

In the inflection of the verb, the tendency to simplifica- 
tion has gone on rapidly and produced marked changes 
since the Middle English period. The inflectional endings 
"eth," "est," and "en," remain only as archaisms 
used in the heightened language of poetry, devotion, and 
a certain kind of oratory; or where for dramatic effects in 
Literature a quality of antiquity is desired for the style. 
In regular use in Modern English, the inflectional endings 
remaining are "S" for the Third Person Singular Indica- 
tive; "d"or "t," for the "Weak" Preterite; "ing" for 
the Present Participle. This general elimination of the 
inflectional endings has led tq $ie increased use of the 



176 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

pronouns and the auxiliaries to indicate the distinctions 
of number, person, mode and tense; and in this way our 
grammarians are able to make out a formidable list of 
mode and tense forms so called, with which to make the 
lives of school children unhappy. Indeed the correct use 
of these auxiliaries has its difficulties, as may be seen in the 
frequent trouble with "shall" and "will," "can" and 
"may," etc. In the substantive verb "to be," the dis- 
tinctions of person and number used in Old and Middle 
English, remain in use to a greater extent than in the case 
of other verbs, because these distinctions are not so much 
matters of inflection as the use of distinct roots for the 
different parts; but here too there has been a marked re- 
duction in the number of forms, through the dropping of 
many alternatives which were found in Old English, most 
of these changes having taken place in the Middle English 
period. For example, Modern English uses the word 
"are" for Middle English "be" or "ben," though these 
older forms persist in the language of the uneducated. 
The Imperative form "beth" has disappeared; and the 
Past Participle which in Middle English varied between 
"be" and "ben," has become regularly" been." Other- 
wise, allowing for the changes in spelling and the dropping 
of the negative forms "nam," "nis," etc., the verb re- 
mains very much as it was in Chaucer's day. With the 
irregular verb "go," the only important change from 
Middle English usage is the dropping of the Preterite form 
"yede," and the consequent invariable use of "went," 
as the Preterite of this verb. Both with this verb and the 
verb "do," the old inflections in "th," "st," and "n" 
are more frequently used than in other words; and both 
retain the combination of "Weak" Preterites, "went" 
and "did," with "Strong" Past Participles "gone" and 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 177 

"done," a peculiarity which accounts, perhaps for the 
frequent solecisms in the use of these very common words. 
It is very plain from this glance at the history of Eng- 
lish grammar that the language is still in a fluid condition. 
More thorough study would doubtless strengthen this 
impression of fluidity. In vocabulary and grammar, 
alike, there is evident a strong conservative tendency 
holding the practice of the best writers to the pure English 
diction and the fundamental Teutonic principles of struct- 
ure, along with a freedom of addition and a facility of 
adaptation and alteration of forms which are greatly en- 
riching the material of speech and increasing the flexibility 
and efficiency of its use. The language is quite sure to 
hold its essential qualities as the medium of the great 
Literature of the past, while it goes forward to its mission 
as a medium of the world's scholarship, science, philosophy, 
and religious teaching, through an unbounded future. 



178 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 179 



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180 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 





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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



181 



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Part II 

TABULATION OF 

GRAMMATICAL FORMS 

SHOWING THE MORE IMPORTANT FEATURES 

OF THE 

DECLENSIONS AND CONJUGATIONS OF OLD ENGLISH 

AND 

PRESENTING IN PARALLEL COLUMNS THE USAGE 

OF THE THREE PERIODS 



184 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 185 



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186 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 187 



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188 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 189 



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190 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

OLD ENGLISH MIDDLE ENGLISH 

I — Ancren Riwle and 
Ormulum 

Third Person 

Masc. Fern. Neut. Masc. Fern. Neut. 

Sing. Nom. he hie, heo hit he heo hit 

Gen. his hire his 

Dat. him hire him 

Ace. hine hie, heo hit him, hine hire him 
Inst. him hire him 



All Genders 




Plu. Nom. 


hie, heo 


All Genders 


Gen. 


hira 


heo 


Dat. 


him, heom 




Ace. 


hie, heo 


heom, hem 


Inst. 


him, heom 





THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 191 



MIDDLE ENGLISH 

2 — Chaucer 



MODERN ENGLISH 



Masc. 
he 



Fern, 
she 



Neut. 
00 it 



hym hire (h) it 




All Genders 
they 



hem 



All Genders 
they 
their 

them, to them 
them 
from them 



The Genitive forms omitted, in the Middle English 
tables in accordance with Sweet's Primer where these 
forms are regarded as "Adjectives." 



192 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



u 

J3 J ,3 .1 J S 

Ph ^ KO KO KO KO 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 193 






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194 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 195 




f-4 O *» 






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196 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 





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THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 197 



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198 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



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200 THE STORY OP ENGLISH SPEECH 



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Part III 

SPECIMENS OF 

OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH 

WITH GLOSSARY 



Part III 

SPECIMENS OF OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH 
WITH GLOSSARY 

In reproducing these Specimens, the aim has been to 
follow the sources as closely as possible. It did not, how- 
ever, seem wise to attempt the reproduction of the Mss. 
marks, such as the abbreviations for "And," "That," 
etc. 

I. Widsi9, or The Minstrel's Wanderings. 

Considered by some scholars the beginning of English 
Literature; brought by the early English from their ancient 
home on the coast of Northern Germany. The extracts 
below are, of course, in the West Saxon dialect. They 
are taken from the " Grein-Wiilker Bibliothek Der Angel- 
sachsischen Poesie." 

WidsiS maSolade, wordhord onleac 
se J>e monna maest mae3j>a ofer eorJ)an, 
folca 3eondferde: oft he on flette 3eJ>ah 
mynelicne maj^um 

On3on J>a worn sprecan: 
Tela ic monna 3efrae3n mae3j)um wealdan; 
sceal J)eodna 3ehwylc J)eawum lif 3an, 
eorl aefter 6j>rum e31e raedan, 
se J)e his J)eodenstol 3eJ)eon wile. 

201 



202 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 



Swa ic J)aet symle onfond on J)aere ferine, 
J)aet se bij> leofast londbuendum, 
se J>e him 3od syle9 3umena rice 
to 3ehealdenne; J)enden he her leofa9. — ' 
Swa scrij>ende 3esceapum hweorfa9 
3leomen 3umena 3eond 3runda fela, 
J)earfe sec3a9, J)oncword sprecaj), 
simle su9 oJ)J)e nor3 sumne 3emeta9 
3ydda 3leawne, 3eofum unhneawne, 
se \>e fore du3uj)e wile dom araeran, 
eorlscipe aefnan, oj) J)aet eal scaeceS, 
leoht and lif somod: lof se 3ewyrce9, 
hafa9 under heofonum heahfaestne dom. 

II. Caedmon's Hymnus. Traditionally the first bit 
of verse composed in England. See the story in most 
Histories of English Literature; taken from Bede's "Ec- 
clesiastical History of the English." The Northumbrian 
version is the only example of poetry in that dialect now 
accessible to the reader. This is from the " Grein-Wulker 
Bibliothek," also. 

Northumbrian Version 

Nu scylun her3an hefaenricaes uard, 

metudaes maecti end his mod3idanc, 

uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra 3ihuaes 

eci dryctin or astelidae. 

He aerist scop aelda barnum 

heben til hrofe hale 3 scepen 

tha middun3eard moncynnaes uard, 

eci dryctin aefter tiadae 

flrum foldan, frea allmecti3. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 203 

West Saxon Version 

Nu sculon heri3ean heofonrices weard 

meotodes meahte and his mod3e]panc, 

weorc wuldorfaeder, swa he wundra 3ehwaes 

ece drihten or onstealde. 

He aerest sceop eor3an bearnum 

heofon to hrofe hali3 scyppend; 

J>a middan3eard monncynnes weard, 

ece drihten aef ter teode 

firum foldan, frea aelmihti3. 



III. The Lord's Prayer, in Gothic, Old English, Mid- 
dle English, (Wyclif's Version), and Early Modern Eng- 
lish, (Tyndale's Version). Taken from "The Gothic and 
Anglo-Saxon Gospels in Parallel Columns with the Ver- 
sions of Wy cliff e and Tyndale," by Bosworth and Waring, 
London, 1874. 



(1) Gothic Version Ulphilas, about 360 A. D. 

Atta unsar Jm in himinam, weihnai namo J)ein; 

Qimai Jnudinassus J)eins; wairj)ai wily a J)eins 

swe m himina yah ana airj)ai; 

Hlaif unsarana ]?ana sinteinan gif uns himma daga; 

Yah aflet uns J)atei skulans siyaima, swaswe yah 

weis afletam J)aim skulam unsaraim; 

Yah ni briggais uns in fraistubnyai, ak lausei uns 

af J)amma ubilin; unte J>eina ist J)iudangardi, yah 

mahts, yah wu1]dus In arwins. Amen. 



204 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

(2) Old English Version. About 995 A. D. 

Faeder tire 9u 9e eart on heofonum, si 3ln nama gehal- 

god; 
To-becume 3m rice; gewur3e 9ln willa on eorJ>an swa- 

sw& on heofonum; 
Urne daeghwamlican hlaf syle uns to-daeg; 
And forgyf us tire gyltas, swa swa we forgyfaj) urum 

gyltendum; 
And ne gelaed 3u us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele. 

SoJ)lice. 



(3) Middle English Version. Wyclif's Bible, about 
1380. 

Oure fadir that art in heuenes. halwid be thl name; 
ThI kyngdom cumme to; be thl wille don as in heuen and 

in erthe; 
3if to vs this day oure breed ouer other substaunce; 
And for3eue to vs oure dettis, as we for3eue to oure det- 

tours; 
And leede vs nat in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro 

yuel. 

Amen. 



(4) Early Modern English Version. Tyndale, 
about 1525. 

O oure father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name; 
Let thy kingdom come; they wyll be fulfilled as well in 
erth as hit ys in heven; 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 205 

Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade; 

And forgeve vs oure trespasses, even as we forgeve them 

which trespass vs; 
Leede vs not into temptacion, but delivre vs ffrom yvell. 

Amen. 

IV. (1) Boethius "De Consolatione Philosophiae." 
Book II. Metre V. Translation into West Saxon by 
Alfred, the Great; about 900 A. D. Edition by Rev. S. 
Fox, in Bohn's Antiquarian Library. 

Eala hu Gesaelig seo forme eld waes J)ises middangeardes. 
J)a aelcum men J)uhte genog on J^aere eorJ)an waestmum. 
Naeron \>a welige hamas-ne mist-lice swotmettas — ne 
drincas — ne diorwyrj^ra hraegla hi ne girndan. for^am hi 
J>a git naeran — ne hie nanwuht ne gesawon. ne ne geherd- 
on. Ne gemdon hie nanes fyrenlustes, buton swij)e gemet- 
lice J)a gecynd beeodon ealne weg hi aeton aene on daeg, 
and J)aet waes to aevennes. Treowa waestmas hi aeton 
and wyrta, nalles scir win hi ne druncan, ne nanne waet- 
an hi ne ctiJ)on wij) himige mengan, ne seolocenra hraegla 
mid misthcum bleowum hi ne girndon. Ealne weg hi slepon 
ute on triowa sceadum, hluterra wella waeter hi druncon, 
ne geseah nan cepa ealand, ne weroj), ne geherde non mon 
J>a get nanne sciphere, ne furJ)on ymbe nan gefeoht spre- 
can; ne seo eorJ>e J>a get besmiton mid ofslegenes monnes 
blode, ne mon furj>um gewundod,ne mon ne geseah J)a get 
yfel willende men naenne weorJ>scipe raerdon, ne hi non 
mon ne lufude. Eala J)aet ure tida nu ne mihtan weor3an 
swilce. Ac nu manna gitsung is swa byrnende swa J)aet 
fyr on J)aere helle, seo is on 3am munte J)e Aetne hatte, on 
J)am ieglande \>e Sicilia hatte — se mimt bij> simle swefle 
birnende, and ealla J)a neah stowa J)aer ymbutan forbaern3. 
Eala hwaet se forme gitsere waere, \>e aerest l>a eorJ>an 



206 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

ongan delfan aefter golde, and aefter gimmum, and J)a 
frecnan deorwurjmessa funde 3e aer behyd waes and 
beheld mid 9aere eorjmn. 

IV. (2) Chaucer's Translation of the same passage: 
Book Two; Metre V. of the "De Consolatione Philoso- 
phiae" of Boethius. Taken from Skeat's Edition of the 
Complete Works of Chaucer. This translation was made 
about the year 1378. 

Blisful was the first age of men! They helden hem 
apayed with the metes that the trewe feldes broughten 
forth. They ne distroyede nor deceivede nat hemself 
with outrage. They weren wont lightly to slaken hir 
hunger at even with acornes of okes. They ne coude nat 
medly the yif te of Bachus to the cleer hony ; that is to seyn, 
they coude make no piment nor clarree; ne they coude 
nat medle the brighte fleeses of the contree of Seriens with 
the venim of Tyrie; this is to seyn, they coude nat deyen 
whyte fleeses of Serien contree with the blode of a maner 
shelfisshe that men finden in Tyrie, with whiche blood 
men deyen purpur. They slepen hoolsom slepes up-on 
the gras, and dronken of the renninge wateres; and lay en 
under the shadwes of the heye pyn-trees. Ne no gest ne 
straungere ne carf yit the heye see with ores or with 
shippes; ne they ne hadde seyn yit none newe strondes, 
to leden marchaundyse in- to dy verse contrees. Tho 
weren the cruel clariouns ful hust and ful stille, ne blood 
y-shad by egre hate ne hadde nat deyed yit armures. 
For wher-to or which woodnesse of enemys wolde first 
moeven armes, whan they seyen cruel woundes, ne none 
medes be of blood y-shad. 

I wolde that oure tymes sholde torne ayein to the olde 
maneres! But the anguissous love of havinge brenneth 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 207 

in folk more cruely than the fyr of the mountaigne Ethna, 
that ay brenneth. Alias! What was he that first dalf 
up the gobetes or the weightes of gold covered under 
erthe, and the precious stones that wolden han ben hid? 
He dalf up precious perils. That is to seyn, that he that 
hem first up dalf, he dalf up a precious peril; for-why for 
the preciousnesse of swiche thinge, hath many man ben 
in peril. 

IV. (3) Queen Elizabeth's Translation of the same 
passage, 1593. From "Queen Elizabeth's Englishings : " 
Early English Text Society; 1899. 

Happy to muche the formar Age 

With faithful fild content, 
Not Lost by sluggy Lust, 

that wontz the Long f astz 
To Louse by son-got Acorne. 

that knew not Baccus giftz 
With molten hony mixed 

Nor Serike shining flise 
With tirius venom die. 

Sound slipes Gaue the grasse 
ther drink the running streme 

Shades gaue the hiest pine. 
The depth of sea they fadomd not 

Nor wares chosen from fur 
Made Stranger find new shores. 

Than wer Navies Stil, 
Nor bloudshed by Cruel hate 

Had fearful weapons staned. 
What first fury to foes shuld 

any armes rayse, 



208 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Whan cruel woundz he Saw 

and no reward for bloude? 
Wold God agane Our formar time 

to wonted maners fel! 
But Gridy getting Loue burnes 

Sorar than Etna with her flames. 
O who the first man was 

of hiden Gold the waight 
Or Gemmes that willing lurkt 
The deare danger digd? 

V. Ormulum: about 1200 A. D. From the Edition of 
R. M. White; Oxford 1852. Lines 19819-19884. 

Herode King off Galile 

Toe Sannt Johan Bapptisste, 

And band himm wiJ)J) irrene band 

And warrp himm in cwarnterrne 

And tatt wass forr Herodian 

Filippes wif hiss broJ)err, 

J)att f ra Filippe raefedd wass 

J)urrh hire faderr wraj)£>e, 

And gifenn till Herode King 

All forr Filippes tene 

J)att laj)e wifess faderr wass 

Arete King 3ehatenn 

And he wass wurrj)enn swij)e wraj) 

WiJ)J) hiss a^umm Filippe, 

And toe hiss dohhterr all forr£>i' 

Forr wraj)e f ra Filippe 

And 3aff Herode King J)att wif 

All forr Filippes tene, 

Jmtt time Jmtt Herode wass 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 209 

Unnwine wiJ)J) Filippe; 

Swa t>att he wass himm swij)e wraj) 

J)ohh J>att he wass hiss broken, 

And toe hiss wif himm f ra forrJ)i 

Full blij>eli3 forr tene. 

And hire itt J)uhhte swij>e god 

J>att 3ho wass wiJ)J) Herode 

ForrJ)i J)att 3I10 wass ifell wif 

And Drihhtin all unncweme. 

And Sannt Johan Bapptisste comm 

Biforr ]?e King Herode, 

And seggde himm Jmss all openli3 

Swa summ J)e Goddspell kij)ej)j), 

Ne birrj) \>e nohht tin bro^err wif 

Jniss habbenn J)e to wife 

Whil Jmtt tin broj^err lifeJ>J> 3et, 

\>u list inn haefedd sinne. 

And wel itt haffde Herodias 

All herrd and unnderrstanndenn, 

Jmtt Sannt Johan haffde J)e King 

Bigripenn off hiss sinne. 

And 3I10 warrj) sone gramm and grill 

3aen Sannt Johan Bapptisste, 

Forr J)att he wollde hire and te king 

Todaelenn and toshaedenn. 

And 3ho toe wraJ)J>e and hete and nij) 

Till Sannt Johan J>aeroffe, 

And J)ohhte J>att 3ho shollde inn himm 

We wreken hire tene, 

And |)ohhte 3I10 wollde himm slan 

3iff £>att 3hot mihhte forrJ)en. 

Ace 3hot ne mihhte f orrJ)en nohht 

Swa raj)e summ 3ho wollde 



210 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Forr J>att itt 3ede off Sannt Johan 

All aflEterr Goddess wille, 

Nohht aflEterr hire, forr 3I10 wass 

Godd laj) and all unncweme. 

And forrt>i wass 3I10 wurrj) att Godd 

3urrh hire depe sinness, 

To don J>att dede o Sannt Johan 

Wi^utenn hise wrihhte, 

J>att shollde dra3henn hire dun 

To dre3henn helle pine, 

And gifenn himm to sti3enn upp 

To brukenn heffness blisse, 

J)urh Cristes dom l>att all wass god 

And rihht onn e33err hallfe. 

In this selection Mr. White's edition has been followed 
as closely as possible, with the exception that "and "has 
been substituted for the abbreviation which is uniformly 
used in the original. 

VI. Layamon's "Brut." Early in the 13th Century. 
From the Edition of Sir Frederic Madden, London, 1847. 

THE DEPARTURE OF ARTHUR 

Ar9ur wes forwunded: 
wunder ane §wl9e. 
\>er to him com a cnave : 
t>e wes of hiS cunne. 
he we$ Cadore§ §une : 
J>e eorle§ of Cornwaile. 
Con§tantin hehte J)e cnaue: 
he we§ J)an Kinge deore. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 211 

Ar3ur him lokede on : 

\>er he lai on f olden. 

and J)as word §eide : 

mid sorhfulle heorte. 

Co§ taetin J)u art wilcume: 

J)u weore Cadore§ §one. 

ich \>e bitache here : 

mine kineriche. 

and wite mine Brutte§ : 

a to t>ine$ Me§. 

and hald heom alle J)a la3en: 

J)a habbeo9 i§tonden a mine da3en. 

and alle J)a la3en gode: 

J)a bi V3ere§ da3en §tode. 

And ich wulle varen to Avalu: 

to vairest aire maidene. 

to Argante J)ere quene : 

alven §wf3e §ceone. 

& heo §hal mine wunden: 

makien alle i§unde. 

al hal me makien: 

mid halewei3e duchen. 

And §eo3e ich cumen wulle: 

to mine kineriche. 

and wunien mid Brutten : 

mid muchelere wunne. 

Aefne J)an worden: 

J>er com of §e wenden : 

l>at wes an §ceort bat li3en : 

§ceouen mid u3en. 

and twa wimme ]3er inne : 

wunderliche idihte. 

And heo nomen Ar9ur ana: 



212 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and aneou§te hine vereden. 
and §ofte hine adun leiden: 
& for 3 gunnen hine li3en. 
J)a we§ hit iwurSen: 
})at m'lin §eide whflen. 
J)at weore unimete care : 
of Ar3ure§ for3-fare. 
Brutte ileved 3ete : 
J)at he bon on liue. 
and wunnien in Aualun : 
mid fairest aire aluen. 
and lokie3 euere Brutte§ 3ete: 
whan Ar3ur cume ti3e. 
Nis nauer J)e mon ibore : 
of nauer nane burde icoren. 
J)e cunne of J)an §o3e: 
of Ar3ure Sugen mare. 
Bute while we§ an wite3e: 
Maerlin ihate. 
he bodede mid worde : 
his qui3e§ weoren §o3e. 
Jmt an Ar3ur §culde 3ete: 
cum Anglen to ful$te. 

VII. Proclamation of Henry III, 1258 A. D. Taken 
from the copy contained in "Ellis on Early English Pro- 
nunciation;" Publications of the Early English Text 
Society; Vol. 2; Extra Series, 1869. 

Henr' t>ur3 gode$ fultume King on Engleneloande, 
Lhoauerd on Yrloand. Duk on Norm' on Aquitain' and 
eorl on Aniow, Send igretinge to alle hi$e holde ilaerde and 
ileawede on Huntendon' §chir' J>aet witen 3§ wel alle J)aet 
we willen and vnnen J>aet. Jmet vre raede§men alle 6j>er 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 213 

J)e moare dael of heom Jmet beoj) icho$en J>ur3 u§ and 
t>ur3 J>aet loande§ folc on vre kuneriche. habbej) idon and 
§chullen don in ]>e wor})ne$$e of gode and on vre treowJ)e. 
for J>e freme of J)e loande. J)ur3 \>e be$i3te of Jmn to 
foreni$eide rede$men: beo §tedefae§t and ile$tinde in alle 
J)inge abuten aende. And we hoaten alle vre treowe in J>e 
treowJ)e J)aet heo v§ 63en. J>aet heo §tedefae$tliche healden 
and §werien to healden and to werien J)6 i§etne$$e§ Jmet 
beon imakede and beon to makien J)ur3 J>an to foren i§eide 
raede§men oj^er J)ur3 J>e moare dael of heom al§wo al§e hit 
i§ biforen i§eid. And J)aet aech o^er helpe £>aet for to 
done bi j^an ilche 6j)e a3ene§ alle men. Ri3t for to done 
and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of e3te. 
wherj)ur3 J)i§ be$i3te mu3e beon ilet 6j>er iwer§ed on 
onie wl§e. And 3if oni oJ)er onie cum'en her on3ene$: we 
willen and hoaten J^aet alle vre treowe heom healden 
deadliche ifoan. And for Jmet we willen |met J)i§ beo 
§tedefae§t and le§tinde: we §enden 3ew {)i$ writ open 
Reined wif) vre §eel. to halden amange§ 3ew inehord. 
Witne$$e v$ §eluen aet Lunden'. J>ane E3tetenJ>e day. 
on \>e Mon]3e of Octobr' In ]>e Twoandfowerti3j)e 3eare 
of vre cruninge. And J)i$ we§ idon aetforen vre i§worene 
rede§men. 

Then follow names of Bishops, Lords and Gentlemen. 

VIIL Ancren Riwle. James Morton's Edition. Cam- 
den Society. 1853. Page 80. 

Vrom al vuel speche, mine leoue sustren, stoppeS ower 
earen, and habbe3 wlatunge of \>e mu9e J)et speoweS ut 
atter. Vuel speche is J)reouold : attri, ful, idel. Idel speche 
is vuel: ful speche is wurse: attri speche is \>e wurste. 
Idel is and unnet al |>et god ne cume3 of: and of swuche 
speche, sei3 tire Louerd, schal euerich word beon irikened, 



214 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

and 3iuen reisoun, hwi J>e on hit seide, and te o9er hit 
hercnade: and tis is Jmuh \>e liste vuel of J)e J>reo vueles. 
Hwat! hu schal me J)eonne 3elden reisoun, of J)e J)reo 
vueles and nomenliche of \>e wurste? Hwat! hu of J)e 
wurste, \>et is, of attri and of f ul speche : nout one J)er J)et 
hit speke9, auh J)eo J)et hit hercne9? * * * * * 
Attri speche is eresie, and J)wertouer leasunge, bacbitunge, 
and fikelunge. J)eos beo9 \>e wurste. Eresie, God beo 
i9oncked, ne rixle9 nout in Engelond; auh leasunge is so 
vuel J)ing J)et seint Austin sei9, J)et for te schilden J)ine 
ueder from dea9e, ne schuldest tu nout lien. God sulf 
sei3 J>et he is so9: and hwat is more a3ein so9 J)an is leas 
and leasunge. "Diabolus mendax est, et pater ejus." 
J)e deouel, hit sei9, is leas, and leasunges feder. J>e ilke 
J)eonne J)et sture9 hire tunge ine leasunge, heo make9 of 
hire tunge cradel to J)es deofles beam, and rocke9 hit 
3eornliche ase nurice. Bacbitunge and fikelunge and 
eggunge to don eni vuel, heo ne beo9 nout monnes speche, 
auh beo9 J)es deofles bles, and his owene stefne. 

Page 416. 

Le, mine leoue sustren, ne schulen habben no best, bute 
kat one. Ancre 9et have9 eihte J)unche9 bet husewif, as 
Mar the was, J)en ancre: ne none wise ne mei heo beon 
Marie, mid gri9fulnesse of heorte. Vor 9eonne mot heo 
])enchen of \>e kues foddre, and of heorde-monne huire, 
oluhnen J)ere heiward, warien hwon me Jyunt hire, and 
3elden, Jmnt, J)e hermes. Wat Crist, J)is is lodlich J)ing 
hwon me make9 mone in tune of ancre eihte. J>auh, 3if 
eni mot nede habben ku, loke J>et heo none monne ne eilie, 
ne ne hermie : ne J)et hire J^ouht ne beo nout J^eron i-vestned. 

In this selection "]>et" and "and" are substituted for 
the abbreviations or signs used in the original. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 215 

IX. Dan Michel's "Ayenbite of Inwit." 1340. A 
Brother of the cloister of Saint Austin of Canterbury. 
Kentish Dialect. From the edition of the "Early Eng- 
lish Text Society," from the autograph Mss. in the British 
Museum: by Richard Morris Esq., 1866. 

J>et 6<5er heaued of the kueade beste is enuie. J>et is 
\>e eddre J)et al enuenymej). Enuie is moder to J)e dya^e. 
vor by J)e enuie of \>e dyeule: com dyaj) to ^>e wordle \>et 
is J)e zenne J)et mest ari3t makej) man ilich \>e dyeule his 
uader. Vor J)e dyeuel ne hatej) bote ojDres guod, and ne 
louej) bote 6j)res harm, and zuo dejp Ipe enuious. J>e 
enuious ne may ysy J)et guod of oj^ren nanmore Jmnne 
£>e oule 6j>er \>e calowe-mous J>e bri3tnesse of \>e zonne. 
J)e ilke zenne him todelj) ine ]3ri bo3es he3liche. Vor J)e 
ilke zenne anuenymej) alj)eruerst J)e herte of \ye enuious 
and efterward Jmne mouj) and efterward Ipe workes. J)e 
herte of the enuious ys enuenymed and suo miswent, J)et 
he ne may 6j)re manne guod yzy \>et hit him ne uorjnng]} 
wyj)inne )>e herte and dem|) kueadliche and \>et he yzl3j) 
6j)er J)et he yherj): nimj) hit to kueade wytte and of al 
make J) his harm, zuo moche J)et to \>e herte of J)e enuious 
J)03tes uenimouses of valsdom J)et me ne hise may telle, 
efterward {)anne J>e enuious y-her|) oJ)er yzyjy 6j)re manne 
kued huet J)et hit by 6j)er kuead of bodye ase dyaj) 6j)er 
ziknesse. oJ>er kuead of auenture (hap.) ase pouerte 
6j)er aduersite. oJ)er kuead gostlich ase huanne he yherj) 
J>et zome £>et me hyelde guode men is y -blamed zome vice. 

X. The Owl and the Nightingale. Date uncertain, 
given by various authorities from 1189 to 1272. Author- 
ship ascribed to Nicholas de Guilford of Portesham. 

Lines 433-458. 



216 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Ni3tingale. 
Ac ich alle blisse mid me bringe, 
Ech wiht is glad for mine thinge 
An blisseth hit wanne ich cume 
An hi3teth a3en mine kunne : 
The blostme ginneth springe an sprede, 
Both ine tro an ek on mede : 
The lilie, mid hire f aire wlite, 
Wolcumeth me, that thu hit wite, 
Bid me mid hire faire bio, 
That ich shulle to hire flo. 
The rose also, mid hire rude 
That cumeth ut of the thorne wode, 
Bit me that ich shulle singe 
Vor hire luue one skintinge; 
An ich so do thur3 ni3t an dai, 
The more ich singe the more I mai, 
An skente hi mid mine songe, 
Ac notheles, no3t ouerlonge. 
Ware ich i-so that men both glade, 
Ich nelle that hi bon to sade; 
Than is i-do vor than ich com, 
Ich fare a3en, an do wisdom. 
Wane mon ho3eth of his sheue, 
An falewi cumeth on grene leue, 
Ich fare horn an nime leue, 
Ne recche ich no3t of winteres reue. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 217 

Lines 1187-1216. 

Ule. 

For ich am witi ful i-wis, 

An wod al that to-kumen is, 

Ich wot of hunger, of her3onge, 

Ich wot 3ef men schule libbe longe, 

Ich wot 3ef wif luste hire make; 

Ich wot war schal beo nlth an wrake; 

Ich wot hwS schal beon an-honge, 

Other elles fulne deth a-fonge. 

3ef men habbeth bataile i-nume 

Ich wot hwather schal beon over-kume. 

Ich wot 3if cwalm seal comen on orfe, 

An 3if dor schul ligge arid storue; 

Ich wot 3ef treon schule blowe, 
cornes schule growe, 
huses scule berne, 
men schule eorne other erne, 
sea schal schipes drenche, 
snawes schal uuele clenche. 

An 3et ich con muchel more, 

Ich con i-noh in bokes lore; 

An eck ich con of the Goddspelle 

More than ich nule the telle; 

For ich at chirche come i-lome, 

An muche leorne of wisdome. 

Ich wot al of the tacnunge, 

An of other feole thinge; 

3ef eni man schal rem abide, 

Al ich hit wot ear hit i-tide. 

Of te for mine muchele i-witte 

Wei sori-mod an worth ich sitte. 



218 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Abbreviations in Specimens and Glossary. 

A. B. Alfred's Translation of Boethius. 

ace. accusative case 

A. I. Ayenbite of Inwit 

aj. adjective 

A. R. Ancren Riwle 

C. B. Chaucer's Translation of Boethius 

C. H. Caedmon's Hymnus 

cj. conjunction 

dat. dative case 

dem. demonstrative pronoun 

f . feminine gender 

gen. genitive case 

H. Henry the Third's Proclamation 

imp. imperative mode 

ind. indicative mode 

indef . indefinite pronoun 

inf. infinitive mode 

inst. instrumental case 

L. B. Layamon's Brut 

L. P. The Lord's Prayer 

neut. neuter gender 

North. Northumbrian 

O. The Ormulum 

O & N. The Owl and the Nightingale 



part. 


participle 


pass. 


passive voice 


P i. 


plural number 


poss. 


possessive adjective 


pr. 


pronoun 


pres. 


present tense 


pt. 


preterite tense 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 219 

rel. relative pronoun 

s. singular number 

sup. superlative degree 

W. WidsiS 

Glossary 

a, ever, always, C. B., L. B. 

a-buten, without. H. 

ac,but.L. P. A. B. O. O. &N. 

aduersite, adversity. A. I. 

adun, down. L. B. 

aech, each. H. 

aefnan, perform, exercise. W. 

aefne, even. L. B. 

aefter, after. W. C. H. A. B. 

aelcum (dat. s.), each. A. B. 

aelda (gen. pi.), men. C. H. (North) 

aelmihti3, almighty. C. H. 

aende, end. H. 

aene, once. A. B. 

aer, formerly. A. B. 

aerest, first. C. H. A. B. 

aerist, first. C. H. (North). 

aetforen, before. H. 

aeton, ate. A. B. 

aevennes, evening. A. B. 

a-fonge, seize, receive. O. & N. 

a3ein, against, again. A. R. 

a3en, against, again, towards. O. & N. 

a3enes, against. H. 

al, all. L. B. A. R. A. I. O. & N. 

alle, all. L. B. H. A. I. O. & N. 



220 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

allmecti3, almighty. C. H. (North.) 

allre (gen. pi.), all. L. B. 

alse, as. H. 

alswo, so. H. 

alj)eruerst, first of all. A. I. 

alven, elves. L. B. 

alys, release, deliver. L. P. 

amanges, among. H. 

an (prep.), on, to, in. L. B. 

an (cj.), and. O. & N. 

ana, up. L. B. 

ancre, anchorite, nun. A. R. 

ane, only. L. B. 

aneouste, in presence, near. L. B. 

Anglen, English. H. L. B. 

anguissous, full of anguish. C. B. 

an-honge, hung. O. & N. 

anuenymej), poisons. A. I. 

apayed, satisfied. C. B. 

araeran, raise, establish. W. 

ari3t, truly, indeed. A. I. 

armures, armor. C. B. 

ase, as. A. R. A. I. 

astelidae, established. C. H. (North.) 

atter, poison. A. R. 

attri, poisonous. A. R. 

aj)umm, son-in-law. O. 

auh, but. A. R. 

auenture, fortune. A. I. 

ayein, again. C. B. 

ayenbite, remorse. A. I. 

band (pt.) bound. O. 

barnum (dat. pi.), children. C. H. (North) 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 221 

bat, boat. L. B. 

bataile, battle. O. & N. 

beam, child. C. H. A. R. 

becume, come. 

beeodon (pt. pi. of began), worship, observe. A. B. 

begripan, apprehend, accuse. O. 

behelan, conceal. A. B. 

behydan, hide. A. B. 

beo, be. H. A. R. O. & N. 

beon, be, are. H. A. R. O & N. 

beoj), be, are. H. A. R. 

berne, burn. O. & N. 

besi3te, provision. H. 

besmiton, defiled. A. B. 

best (e), beast. A. R. A. I. 

bet, better. A. R. 

bi, by. L. B. 

biforen, before. H. 

biforr, before. O. 

birnende, burning. A. B. 

birrj), becomes, beseems. O. 

bit, bids, asks. O. & N. 

bitache, commit, entrust. L. B. 

bij> (from beon), is. W. A. B. 

bleowum (dat. pi. of bleo), colors. A. B. 

bles, blast. A. R. 

blisseth, blesses. O. & N. 

blit>eU3, blithely. O. 

bio, color. O. & N. 

blode, blood. A. B. C. B. 

blostme, blossom. O & N. 

blowe, bloom. O. & N. 

bodede (pt. of bodien), preached, proclaimed. L. B. 



222 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

bo3, bough, branch. A. I. 

bokes, books. O. & N. 

bon (beon), be. L. B. O. & N. 

bote, but, except. A. I. 

both (beoj)), be, are. O. & N. 

brennen, burn. C. B. 

brukenn, enjoy. O. 

Bruttes, Britons. L. B. 

burde, lady. L. B. 

bute, but, except. L. B. A. R. 

btiton, but, except. A. B. 

by (Opt.), be. A. I. 

byrnende, burning. A. B. 

calouwe-mous, bald mouse, bat. A. I. 

cepa, merchant. A. B. 

chirche, church. O & N. 

clarioun, trumpet. C. B. 

clarree, a spiced wine. C. B. 

cnaue, see cnave. L. B. 

cnave, boy, servant. L. B. 

com, came. L. B. A. I. O. & N. 

comen, come. O & N. A. I. 

comm, came. O & N. O. 

con, know, be able. O & N. 

costnung, temptation. L. P. 

coude (pt. of cunnon), knew, could. C. B. 

cruninge, crowning. H. 

cumen, come. L. P. L. B. H. A. R. O & N. 

cunne, race. L. B. 

cunnen, to know, be able. L. B. 

cujxm, (pt. pi.), knew. A. B. 

cwalm, death. O & N. 

cwarnterrne, prison. O. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 223 

daeg, day. A. B. 

daeghwamlican, daily. L. P. 

dael, part. H. 

da3en, days. L. B. 

dai, day. O. & N. 

dalf (pt. of delfan), dug. C. B. 

dede, deed. O. 

delfan, dig. A. B. 

demt> (deman), judges. A. I. 

deofles (gen. of deofol), devil. A. R. 

deore, dear, precious. L. B. 

deorwurjmess, treasure. A. B. 

deouel, devil. A. R. 

deth (don), doth. A. I. 

deth, death. O. & N. 

diorwyrjpra (aj. pi.), costly. A. B. 

dohhterr, daughter. O. 

dom, judgment, fame. W. O. 

don, do. O. H. A. R. 

dor (deor), animal. 0. & N. 

dra3henn (dra3en), draw. O. 

dre3henn (dreo3en), endure. O. 

drenche, drown. 0. & N. 

Drihten, Lord, Prince. C. H. O. 

druncan (pt. pi.), drank. A. B. 

Dryctin, Prince. C. H. (North.). 

duchen, beaten. L. B. 

du3uj)e, host, body of retainers. W. 

dun, down. 0. 

dyaj), death. A. I. 

dyeule, devil. A. I. 

eal, all. W. 

eala, alas. A. B, 



224 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

ealand, island. A. B. 

ealla (pi. of eal), all. A. B. 

ealne (ace), all. A. B. 

ear, ere, before. 0. & N. 

earen (pi.) ears. A. R. 

eart (from beon), art. L. P. 

ece, eternal. C. H. 

eci, eternal. C. H. (North.). 

ech, each. O. & N. 

eck, also. O. & N. 

eddre, adder. A. I. 

efterward, afterward. A. I. 

egre, eager. C. B. 

eggunge, instigation, "egging." A. R. 

e33err, either, every. O. 

e3te, property, cattle. H. 

e3tetenj)e, eighteenth. H. 

eilie, annoy. A. R. 

eihte, property, cattle. A. R. 

ek, also, eke. O. & N. 

eld, age. A. B. 

elles, else. O. & N. 

end, and. C. H. (North.). 

Engelond. England. A. R. 

Englenloande, England. H. 

eni, any. A. R. O. & N. 

enuie, envy. A. I. 

enuenymej), poisons. A. I. 

enuious, envious. A. I. 

eorl, earl. W. L. B. H, 

eorlscipe, nobility. W f 

eorne, rim. O. & N, 

^ornliche, eagerly. A. R. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 225 

eorte, earth. W. C. H. L. P. A. B. 

eresie, heresy. A. R. 

erne, run. O. & N. 

ej)le (dat. of e£>el), native land. W. 

euere, ever. L. B. 

euerich, every. A. R. 

faderr, father. O. 

fadir, father. L. P. 

faeder, father. L. P. 

falewi, dark, yellow. O. & N. 

fare, travel, fare. O. & N. 

feder, father. A. R. 

fela, many. W. 

feole, many. O. & N. 

ferine, travelling, journey. W. 

fikelunge, flattery. A. R. 

firum (dat. pi. of firas), men. C. H. 

flett, floor. W. 

flo, (fleo 3 en), fly. O. & N. 

foangen, receive. H. 

foddre, fodder, food. A. R. 

folc, people, folk. H. W. 

foldan (folde), land, field. C. H. 

f olden (folde), land, field. L. B. 

forbaernj), burns up, destroys. A. B. 

fore, before. W. 

foreneseide, aforesaid. H. 

for-gyf, forgive. L. P. 

forme, first, former. A. B. 

forrJ)en, promote, execute. O. 

forrJ)i, therefore. O. 

lorJD^rn, because. A. B. 



226 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

forjrfare, departure, death. L. B. 

for-why, therefore. C. B. 

forwunded, wounded. L. B. 

fowerti3j)e, fortieth. H. 

fra, from. O. 

Frea, Lord. C. H. 

frecne, dangerous. A. B. 

freme, profit, advantage. H. 

ftil, foul. A. R. 

ful, very, full. C. B. O. &N. 

fulne, foul (ace.). O. & N. 

fulst, help. L. B. 

fultum, help. L. B. H. 

funde (pt. of finden), found. A. B. 

fur]3on, first. A. B. 

furfmm, first. A. B. 

fyr, fire. A. B. C. B. 

fyrenlust, luxury. A. B. 

ge-cynd, nature. A. B. 

ge-feoht, fight, battle. A. B. 

ge-halgod, hallowed. L. P. 

ge-herdon, heard. A. B. 

ge-metlice, modestly. A. B. 

ge-laed, lead. L. P. 

ge-nog, enough. A. B. 

ge-saelig, blessed, happy. A. B. 

ge-sawon (pt. pi. of ge-seon), saw. A. B. 

ge-seah (pt. s. of ge-seon), saw. A. B. 

ge-wundod, wounded. A. B. 

ge-wur9e (imp. of ge-weor9an), be done. L. P. 

gemdon (pt. pi. of gieman), cared for. A. B. 

get, yet. A. B. 






THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 227 

gest, guest, stranger. C. B. 

gifenn, given. O. 

gimmum (dat. pi. of gim), gems. A. B. 

ginnan, begin. 0. & N. 

girndon, desired, yearned. A. B. 

git, yet. A. B. 

gitsere, covetous person. A. B. 

gitsung, covetousness. A. B. 

gobet, small piece. C. B. 

god, good. O. A. R. L. B. 

goddspell, gospel. O. O. & N. 

gostlich, spiritual. A. I. 

gramm, angry. O. 

grene, green. O. & N. 

grill, fierce. O. 

gri3fulnesse, peacefulness. A. R. 

gunnen, began. L. B. 

guod, good. A. I. 

gyltas, offences. L. P. 

gyltendum (dat. pi.) offenders. L. P. 

3e-frae3n (pt. of 3efri3nan), learn by asking. W. 

3e-hatenn, called. O. 

3e-healdenne, to keep. W. 

3e-hwaes (gen. s. of 3e-hwa), every one. C. H. 

3e-hwylc, each, every. W. 

3e-metan, meet. W. 

3e-sceapum (inst. pi. of 3e-sceap), creation, decree. W. 

3e-J)ah, prosper, receive. W. 

3e-J)eon, make to prosper. . W. 

3e-wyrce3, works. W. 

3i-huaes, North, for 3e-hwaes. C. H. (North). 

3aen, against. O. 



228 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

3aff, gave. O. 

3e, ye. H. 

3ear, year. H. 

3ede (eode, pt. s. of gan) went. O. 

3 ef, if. O. & N. 

3elden, yield, give. A. R. 

3eofum (inst. pi. of 3iefu), gifts. W. 

3eond, around. W. 

3eondferde (pt. s. of 3eondferan), traversed. W. 

3eornliche, carefully. A. R. 

3et, yet. O. 

3ete, yet. L. B. 

3ew, you. H. 

3I10, she. O. 

3hot (3I16 hit), she it. O. 

3 if, if. H. A. R. O. & N. 

3if, give. L. P. 

3 jff,if. O. 

3iuen, given. A. R. 

3leaw, clever. W. 

3leomen, minstrels. W. 

3od, God. W. 

3rund, bottom, land, sea. W. 

3umena (gen. pi. of 3uma) men. W. 

3ydd, poem, song. W. 

habban, have. O. 

habben, have. A. R. 

habbej), have, has. H. A. R. O. & N. 

habbeoj), have. L. B. 

hafa3, has. W. 

haefedd, head. O. 

haffde, had. O. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 229 

hal, whole, well. L. B. 

hald (imp. of healden), keep, hold. L. B. 

hale3, holy. C. H. (North.). 

halewei3e, balsam. L. B. 

hali 3 , holy. C. H. 

hallfe, behalf . 0. 

halwid, hallowed. L. P. 

hamas, homes. A. B. 

han, have. C. B. 

hatte (pass, of hatan), is called. A. B. 

heahfaest, firm, stable. W. 

healden, hold, keep. H. 

heaued, head. A. I. 

heben, heaven. C. H. (North.). 

hefaenricaes, kingdom of Heaven. C. H. (North.), 

heffness, heaven's. 0. 

he3liche, chiefly. A. I. 

hehte (pt. pass, of hatan), was called. L. B. 

heiward, farm-bailiff. A. R. 

helle,hell. A. B. 0. 

hem, them. C. B. 

heo, she. L. B. A. R. 

heo, they. L. B. H. A. R. 

heofon, heaven. W. C. H. L. P. 

heofonrice, kingdom of heaven. C. H. 

heom, them. L. B. H. 

heorde-mon, herdman. A. R. 

heorte, heart. L. B. A. R. 

her, here. W. H. 

hercnade, hearkened. A. R. 

hercne3, hearkens. A. R. 

her3an, praise. C. H. (North.). 

heri3ean, praise. C. H. 



230 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

her3onge, harrying, plundering. O. & N. 

hermes, harms. A. R. 

hermien, to harm. A. R. 

herte, heart. A. I. 

hete, hate. O. 

heuenes, heaven. L. P. 

hi, they, them. A. B. O. & N. 

hie, they, them. A. B. 

hi3teth, hopes. O. & N. 

hine (ace. of he), him. L. B. 

hir (fern, or pi.), her, their. C. B. 

hire (gen. or dat. s. fern.) her. O. A. R. O. & N. 

hise (dat. of his), to him. A. I. 

hit, it. L. B. H. A. R. A. I. O. & N. 

hlaf, loaf, bread. L. P. 

hluterra, clear, pure. A. B. 

hoaten, call, command. H. 

ho3ien, think. O. & N. 

holde, faithful. H. 

hraegla, garments. A. B. 

hrof, roof, C. H. 

hu, how. A. B. A. R. 

huanne, when. A. I. 

huet, what. A. I. 

huire, hire, wages. A. R. 

hunige, honey. A. B. 

hus, house. O. & N. 

husewif, housewife. A. R. 

hust, hushed, quiet. C. B. 

hwaet, lo, what. A. B. 

hwat, what. A. R. 

hwat, lo. A. R. 

hwaj)er, which of two, whether. O. & N. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 231 

hweorfan, turn. W. 

hwi, why. A. R. 

hwo, who. O. & N. 

hwon, when. A. R. 

hyelde, held, considered. A. I. 

i-boren, born. L. B. 
i-chosen, chosen. L. B. H. 

-coren, chosen. L. B. 

-dihte, prepared, dressed. L. B. 

-do, done. O. & N. 

-don, done H. O. &. N. 

-foan, enemies. H. 

-3iuen, given. A. R. 

-gretinge, greeting. H. 

-hate, called. L. B. 

-laerde, instructed, learned. H. 

-leawede, ignorant, lay. H. 

-lestinde, lasting. H. 

-let, hindered. H. 

-leved, believed. L. B. 

-lich, like. A. I. 

-lome, frequently. O. & N. 

-makede, made. H. 
i-noh, enough. O. & N. 
i-nume, taken, undertaken. O. & N. 

rikined, reckoned. A. R. 

seid, said. H. 

seined, signed. H. 

setnesses, regulations. H. 
i-so, see. O. & N. 

-stonden, stood. L. B. 
i-sunde, healthy, well. L. B. 



232 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

i-sworene, sworn. H. 

i-tide, happened. O. & N. 

i-3oncked, thanked. A. R. 

i-vestned, fixed. A. R. 

i-wersed, injured. H. 

i-wis, surely. O. & N. 

i-witte, knowledge. O. & N. 

i-wurj>en, become, fulfilled. L. B. 

ic, I. W. 

Ich, I. L. B. O. & N. 

Idel, empty, vain. A. R. 

legland, island. A. B. 

ifell, evil. O. 

ilche, same. H. 

ilke, same. A. R. A. I. 

ine, in. L. B. A. R. A. I. O. & N. 

inehord, in charge. H. 

inwit, conscience. A. I. 

irrene, iron. O. 

kat, cat. A. R. 

kineriche, realm. L. B. 

kij)en, make known, explain. O. 

kued, bad. A. I. 

kues (ku), cows. A. R. 

kuneriche, realm. H. 

kuead, bad. A. I. 

kueadliche, badly. A. I. 

kunne, race, kin. O. & N. 

Ia3en, laws. L. B. 
lai, lay. L. B. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 233 

laj), hateful, loath. O. 

le (la), lo. A. R. 

leas, false, A. R. 

leasunge, falsehood. A. R. 

leiden (pt. pi. of leggen), lay. L..B. 

leofast, dearest. W. 

leofa3 (pres. ind. of libban), lives. W. 

leoht, light. W. 

leorne, learn. O. & N. 

leoue, dear. A. R. 

lestinde, lasting. H. 

leue, leaf. O. & N. 

leue, leave. O. & N. 

Lhoauerd, Lord. H. 

libbe, live. O. & N. 

lien, he. A. R. 

lif, life. W. 

Iif3an, live. W. 

liggen, lie. O. & N. 

list, liest. O. 

liste, least. A. R. 

li]3en, travel, go. L. B. 

Hue, life, (on liue, alive) . L. B. 

loande, land. H. 

lodlich, hateful. A. R. 

lof, praise. W. 

lokien (pt. lokede), look. L. B. A. R. , 

londbuend, native, land-dweller. W. 

Louerd, Lord. A. R. 

loue{), loveth. A. R. A. I. 

lufude (pt. s. of lufian), loved. A. B. 

luue, love. O. & N. 

luste, please. O. & N. 



234 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

maecti, might, power. C. H. (North.). 

mae3j), tribe, nation. W. 

maest, most. W. 

mai, may. 0. & N. 

make, mate, companion. O. & N. 

maiden, make. L. B. H. A. R. A. I. 

manna (gen. pi.), men. A. B. 

manni, (pi.) man, A. I. 

mare, more. L. B. 

ma3olade (pt. s. of ma3olian), spoke, in a formal way. W 

maj)|)um, treasure. W. 

me, (indef. pr.) man. A. R. A. I. 

meahte, might, power. C. H. 

mede, meadow. 0. & N. 

medes, rewards, meeds. C. B. 

medly, mix. C. B. 

mei, may. A. R. 

men (dat. s. of man), A. B. 

mengan, mingle. A. B. 

Meotod, Lord, God, Fate. C. H. 

mest (sup. of ma), most. A. I. 

Metudaes (gen. s.) Lord. C. H. (North.). 

mid, with. A. B. A. R. L. B. 0. & N. 

middan3eard, earth, world. C. H. A. B. 

middun3eard, earth, world. C. H. (North.). 

mihhte, might. 0. 

mihtan, might. A. B. 

mistlic, various. A. B. 

miswenden, turn astray. A. I. 

moare, more. H. 

moche, much. A. I. 

moder, mother. A. I. 

mod3el)anc, thought, intelligence. C. H. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 235 

mod3idanc, thought, intelligence. C. H. (North.). 
mon, monnes, monna, see man, etc. W. A. B. L. B. 

A. R. O. & N. 
moncynnes (gen. s.), mankind. C. H. 
moncynnaes (gen. s.), mankind. C. H. (North.), 
mone, money. A. R. 
mot, must. A. R. 
muchel, much. O. & N. 
muchelere (dat. fern.), much, great. L. B. 
mu3e, may. H. 
munt, mount. A. B. 
muj), mouth. A. R. 
mynelicne (ace. s. of mynelic), desirable. W. 

naenne, no. A. B. 

naeran (ne waeran), were not. A. B. 

naeron (ne waeron), were not. A. B. 

nama, name. L. P. 

nalles, not at all. A. B. 

nan, none, no. A. B. 

nanne (ace), no. A. B. L. B. 

nanmore, no more. A. I. 

nanwuht, nothing, not. A. B. 

nat, not. C. B. 

nauer, never. L. B. 

ne, not, nor. L. P. A. B. 0. H. A. R. A. I. 0. & N. 

neah, near. A. B. 

nede, necessarily. A. R. 

nelle (ne wille), will not. 0. & N. 

ni3t, night. 0. & N. 

ni3tingale, nightingale. 0. & N. 

nimen, take. H. 0. & N. 

nimj), takes. A. I. 



236 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

nis (ne is), is not. L. B. 

nith, malice. O. & N. 

nij), malice. O. 

noan, no one. H. 

no3t, not. O. & N. 

nohht (na wiht), nothing, not. O. 

nomen (pt. pi. of nimen), took. L. B. 

nomenliche, namely, especially. A. R. 

non, no. A. B. H. 

none, no. A. R. 

Norm', Normandy. H. 

notheles, none the less. O. & N. 

nout, not. A. R. 

nu, now. C. H. A. B. 

nule (ne wulle), will not. O. & N. 

nurice, nurse. A. R. 

o, on, to. O. 

of, from. L. P. L. B. 

ofer, over. W. 

ofslegenes, slain. A. B. 

53en, owe. H. 

oluhnen, flatter. A. R. 

on (prep.), in, on. W. L. P. A. B. L. B. H. O. & N 

on (an), one. A. R. 

on-fond, discovered. W. 

on-gan, began. A. B. 

on-3enes, against. H. 

on-3on, began. W. 

on-leac, unlocked. W. 

on-stealde, established. C. H. 

one, only. A. R. O. & N. 

oni, any. H. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 237 

onie (pi.) » any. H. 

or, front, beginning. C. H. 

orfe, cattle. 0. & N. 

oj), until. W. 

6j>e, oath. H. 

6t>er, or, other. H. A. R. A. I. O. & N. 

oJ)rum (inst. pi.) others. W. 

oJ)J)e, or. W. 

ouerlonge, overlong. O. & N. 

dule, owl. O. & N. A. I. 

overkume, overcome. O. & N. 

ower, your. A. R. 

piment, a spiced drink. C. B. 
pine, torture. O. 
pouerte, poverty. A. I. 
purpur, purple. C. B. 

quene, queen. L. B. 
qui3es, sayings. L. B. 

raedan, advise. W. 

raedesmen, counsellors. H. 

raefen, rob. O. 

raerdon (pt. pi. of raeran), reared. A. B. 

raj)e, quickly, soon. O. 

recche, care. O. & N. 

redesmen, see raedesmen. H. 

reisoun, reason. A. R. 

rem (hream), scream, cry. O. & N. 

reue, fierceness, trouble. O. & N. 

rice, power, kingdom, W. L. P. 

ri3t, right. H. 



238 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

rihht, right. O. 

riwle, rule. A. R. 

rixlien, reign, flourish. A. R. 

rude, redness. O. & N. 

Sannt, saint. O. 

scaecan, shake. W. 

sceadum (inst. pi.) shadows. A. B. 

seal, shall. O. & N. 

sceal, shall. W. 

sceone, beautiful. L. B. 

sceop, created. C. H. 

sceort, short. L. B. 

scepen, creator. C. H. (North.). 

sceouen, push, shove. L. B. 

schal, shall. A. R. O. & N. 

schilden, shield, protect. A. R. 

schulen, shall. O. & N. A. R. 

schullen, shall. H. A. R. 

sciphere, ship-army, navy. A. B. 

seir, clear, pure. A. B. 

scop, created. C. H. (North.). 

scrij)ende, gliding, wandering. W. 

sculde, should. L. B. 

sculon, shall. C. H. 

scylun, shall. C. H. (North.) 

scyppend, creator. C. H. 

se (dem. pr.) that. W. A. B. 

se (sb.), sea, lake. L. B. 

sec3an, tell, say. W. 

seggde, said. O. 

seide, said. L. B. A. R. 

seint, saintf A, R. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 239 

sei3, saith. A. R. 

seo (dem. pr. f.), that. A. B. 

seolocenra (gen. pi.), silken. A. B. 

seoJ>e, then, afterward, since. L. B. 

sheue, sheaf, harvest. O. & N. 

shollde, should. C. B. O. 

simile, shall. O. & N. 

si (imp. of beon), be. L, P. 

simle, always. W. A. B. 

skenten, delight. O. & N. 

skintinge, pleasure. O. & N. 

slaken, appease, slake. C. B. 

slan, slay. O. 

slepan, sleep. A. B. 

snaw, snow. O. & N. 

softe, gently. L. B. 

somod, together. W. 

sone, quickly, soon. O. 

sorhfulle, sorrowful. L. B. 

sori-mod, melancholy. O. & N. 

soj), truth. L. B. A. R. 

soJ)lice, truly. L. P. 

speche, speech. A. R. 

spekej), speaketh. A. R. 

speowe3, spews. A. R. 

sprecan, speak. W. A. B. 

sprede, spread. O. & N. 

stefne, voice. A. R. 

sti3enn, ascend. O. 

stode, stood. L. B. 

storue, starve, die. O. & N. 

stowa (gen. pi.), places. A. I" 

sture9, stirs. A. R. 



240 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

sue, so, as. C. H. (North.). 

sugen, say. L. B. 

sulf, self. A". R. 

summ, as. O. 

sumne (ace.,) some one. W. 

sune, son. L. B. 

suo, so. A. I. 

sustren, sisters. A. R. 

su3, south. W. 

swa, so, as. W. C. H. L. P. A. B. O. 

swefle, sulphur. A. B. 

swerien, swear. H. 

swiche, such. C. B. 

swilce, such. A. B. 

swij)e, very. A. B. O. L. B. 

swotmettas, sweetmeats. A. B. 

swuche, such. A. R. 

syle (imp. of sellan), give. L. P. 

sylej) (pres. ind.) gives. W. 

symle, always. W. 

tacnunge, signification. O. & N. 

tatt, that. O. 

te, the. O. 4. R. 

te, to. A. R. 

tene, vexation, injury. O. 

teode (pt. of teon), created. C. H. 

tha, then. C. H. (North.). ' 

than, then. O. & N. 

tho, then. C. B. 

thorne, thorny. O. & N. 

thu, thou. O. & N. 

thur3, through. 0. & N. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 241 

tiadae, created. C. H. (North.). 

tida, times. A. B. 

til, till, to. C. H. (North.). 

till, to, until. O. 

tin, thy, thine. O. 

tis, this. A. R. 

to, too. O. & N. 

to-becume, come. L. P. 

toe, took. O. 

to-daeg, today. L. P. 

to-daelan, separate. O. A. I. 

to-kumen, come. O. & N. 

to-shaedan, separate, part. O. 

treon, trees. O. & N. 

treow, tree. A. B. 

treowe, true. H. 

treowJ)e, truth. H. 

triowa (gen. pi.), trees. A. B. 

tro, trees. O. & N. 

tu, thou. A. R. 

tun, town. A. R. 

tunge, tongue. A. R. 

twa, two. L. B. 

ta, then. W. C. H. A. B. 

J>a (f. and pi. of se), that, those. C. H. A. B. L. B. 

J)a (rel), which. L. B. 

J)aer, there. A. B. 

J>aere, (f. gen. and dat. of se), that. W. A. B. 

]}aerorTe, thereof. O. 

J>aet (neut. of se), that. W. A. B. H. 

j)aet (cj.) that. W. A. B. H. 

J)am (dat. s. m. of se). A. B. 



242 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

Jmn (dat. s. m. of se). L. B. 

J)an (inst. pi. of se). L. B. H. 

J)ane (f. ace. of se). H. A. I. 

J>anne, than, then. A. I. 

J)as (pi. of J)es), these. L. B. 

j>att (rel.), that. 0. L. B. 

J)auh, though, however. A. R. 

J)e (rel. part.), who, which, that. W. A. B. L. B. 

A.R. 
3e, who, that. L. P. 

te (def. art.), the. O. L. B. H. A. R. A. I. 
\>e (pers, pr.), thee. O. L. B. 
J)earf, need. W. 

J)eawum (inst. p. of J)eaw), virtues. W. 
J>en, than. A. R. 
J)enchen, think. A. R. 
|)enden, while. W. 
J)eo (f .) the one. A. R. 
J)eodenstol, throne. W. 
J>eodna (gen. pi.), chiefs. W. 
J>eonne, then. A. R. 
J)eos, those. A. R. 
|>er, there. L. B. 
\>er (m.), the one. A. R. 
J>ere, their. L. B. A. R. 
J)es (gen. s. m. of se), of the. A. R. 
t>et, that. A. R. A. I. 
3in, thine. L. P. L. B. A. R. 
J)ises (gen. s. of |)es), this. A. B. 
t>6, those. H. 
J)03tes, thoughts. A. I. 
J)ohh, though. O. 
J)ohhte, thought. O. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 243 

J)oncword, word of thanks. W. 

Jxniht (sb.), thought. A. R. 

J)reo, three. A. R. 

J)reouold, threefold. A. R. 

J)ri, three. A. I. 

9u, l)ti, thou. L. P. O. L. B. 

Jmhhte (pt. s. of J)yncan), seemed. O. 

J)uhte, (pt. s. of J^yncan), seemed. A. B. 

{mncheS, seems. A. R. 

]}ur3, through. H. 

t>urh, through. O. H. 

^wertouer, perverse. A. R. 

uader (vader), father. A. I. 

uard, protector, guardian. C. H. (North.). 

ueder (veder), father. A. R. 

uerc, work. C. H. (North.). 

ule, owl. O. & N. 

unhneaw, abundant, generous. W. 

unimete, immensely. L. B. 

unncweme, unpleasing. O. 

unnet, unprofitable. A. R. 

unnwine, unfriendly. 0. 

uns, us. L. P. 

uorJ)ingJ) (vorJ)ingen), repents. A. I. 

ure, bur. L. P. A. B. A. R. 

urne (ace.) our. L. P. 

ut, out. A. R. O. & N. 

ute, outside. A. B. 

u9e, wave. L. B. 

uuele (yfele), evil. 0. & N. 

uuldorfadur, father of glory. C. H. (North.). 

uundra (gen. pi.) wonders. C. H. (North.). 



244 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

vairest, fairest. L. B. 

vals, false. A. I. 

valsdom, falsehood. A. I. 

varen, travel. L. B. 

vereden, carried. L. B. 

vnnen (unnen), grant. H. 

vor, for. A. I. A. R. O. & N. 

vre (ure), our. H. 

vrom, from. A. R. 

vuel (uvel), evil. A. R. 

waere, were, might be. A. B. 

waes, was. A. B. 

waestmas (pi.), fruit. A. B. 

waestmum (inst. pi.) fruit. A. B. 

waeta, liquid. A. B. 

waeter, water. A. B. 

wane, when. O. & N. 

ware, where. O. & N. 

warien, beware, guard. A. R. 

warrp (pt. s. of weorpan), threw. O. 

warrj) (pt. s. of weorpan), became. O. 

wat, knows. A. R. 

we(wa), woefully. 0. 

wealdan, wield, govern. W. 

weard, protector, guardian. C. H. 

weg, way. A. B. 

welige, wealthy. A. B. 

wella (gen. pi.), fountains, wells. A. B. 

wenden, turn, go. L. B. 

weorc, work. C. H. 

weore, would be, were. L. B. 

weorjmn, become. A. B. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 245 

weor^scipe, dignity, glory. A. B. 

werien, guard, keep. H. 

wero]3, army. A. B. 

wes, was. L. B. H. 

whan, when. L. B. 

wherj)ur3, whereby. H. 

while, formerly. L. B. 

whilen, formerly. L. B. 

widsi9, probably proper name, but may mean "wide 

traveller." W. 
wif, woman, wife. 0. 0. & N. 
wiht, thing, person, wight. O. & N. 
wilcume, welcome. L. B. 
wile (vb.), will. W. 
willa, will. L. P. 

willende (pres. part.) willing. A. B. 
wimme, women. L. B. 
win, wine. A. B. 

wite, (imp.), guard, care for. L. B. 
wite3e, sage, prophet. L. B. 
witen, know. H. 0. & N. 
witi, wise. 0. & N. 
wiJ)J)uten, without. 0. 
wlatunge, disgust. A. R. 
wlite, face, form. O. & N. 
wod, know. 0. & N. 
wode, wood. O. & N. 
wolcumeth, welcomes. O. & N. 
wollde, would. C. B. O. 
woodness, madness, fury. C. B. 
wordhord, word-treasury. W. 
wordle, world. A. I. 
worn, multitude. W. 



246 THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 

worJ>nesse, honor, dignity. H. 
wot, know. O. & N. 
wrake, injury. O. & N. 
wraj), wroth. O. 
wraJ)J)e, wrath. O. 
wreken, avenge, wreak. O. 
wrihhte, thing done, merit. O. 
wuldorfaeder, father of glory. C. H. 
wulle, will. L. B. 
wunde, wound. L. B. 
wunder, wonder. L. B. 
wunderliche, wonderfully. L. B. 
wundian (vb.), wound. L. B. 
wundra (gen. pi.), wonders. C. H. 
wunien, dwell. L. B. 
wunne, joy, delight. L. B. 
wunnien, dwell. L. B. 
wurht, thing done, merit. O. 
wurrj), (aj.), worthy. O. 
wurrj), (p.p.) » become. O. 
wurrjmn (vb.), become. O. 
wurse, worse. A. R. 
wurste, worst. A. R. 
wyrta (gen. pi.) herbs. A. B. 
wytte, thought. A. I. 



y-blamed, blamed. A. I. 
y-heren, hear. A. I. 
y-shad (p. p.), shed. C. B. 
y-sy, see. A. I. 
y-zy, see. A. I. 



THE STORY OF ENGLISH SPEECH 247 

yfel, evil. L. P. A. B. 

yifte, gift. C. B. 

ymbe, about. A. B. 

ymbutan, around about. A. B. 

Yrloand, Ireland. H. 

ys, is. A. I. 

yuel (yvel), evil. L. P. 

zenne, sin. A. I. 

ziknesse, sickness. A. I. 

zome, some. A. I. 

zonne, sun. A. I. 

zuo, so. A. I. 



INDEX 



Ablaut, 63, 82, 189, 195. 
Adjective, 76, 113, 194. 
Adverb, 77. 
African, 139. 
Albanian, 19, 30. 



Baltic, 23/30. 
Balto-Slavic, 23, 30. 
Barbour, 98. 

Battle of Brunanburgh, 38. 
Bede, 37. 



Alfred, 34, 38, 41, 79, 95, Beowulf, 34, 39. 



Bible, 43, 121, 124. 
Boethius, 205. 
Bohemian, 23, 30. 
Book of the Dead, 12. 
Borrowing, 44, 47. 
Breton, 22, 30. 
Britannic, 21, 30, 34. 
British, 35. 
Brut (Layamon's), 95, 99, 

210. 
Bulgarian, 23, 30. 
Bunyan, 125. 

Caedmon, 37, 38, 39, 69, 

202. 
Caedmon's Hymnus, 202. 
Celtic/21, 30, 34,36. 
Celtic .Element in Vocabu- 
lary, 48, 98, 100. 
Chaldean, 12, 30. 
Ayenbite of Inwit, 95, 97, Chaucer, 53, 92, 96, 97, 99, 
215. 102ff, 119, 160, 206. 

249 



205. 
Alphabet, 53. 
Americanisms, 128. 
Ancient Egyptian, 11, 30. 
Ancient jPrussian, 23. 
Ancren Biwle, 95, 97, 213. 
Angles, 32, 34, 35. 
Anglian, 32. 
Anglo-Saxon, 32, 38. 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 38, 

95. 
Anglo-Saxon Gospels, 41. 
Anne (Queen), 126. 
Arabic, 13, 30, 106, 134. 
Armenian, 17, 30. 
Armorican, 22, 30. 
Assyrian, 12, 30. 
Augustan Age, 126* 
Australia, 139. 
Auxiliaries, 81. 



250 INDEX 

Chinese, 139. Dryden, 125. 

Christianity in England, Dual Number, 72, 188. 

38ff, 50. Dunbar, 98. 

Classical Period, 126. Dutch, 29, 133. 
Claudius, 34. 

Commonwealth, 124. East Gothic, 22, 30. 

Comparison, 77. Edward, the Confessor, 90. 

Compounding, 44. Edward III, 94. 

Conjugation, 80ff, 114ff, Elizabeth (Queen), 207. 

169ff, 195ff. , Erse, 22. 

Conjunctions, 78. Egyptian, 11, 30, 139. 
Consonants, 56ff. 

Consonant Pronunciation, Finnish, 14, 30. 

56ff, 109ff, 151ff. Flemish, 29. 

Consonant Shift, 59ff. Franconian, 28, 29. 

Coptic, 11, 30. French, 21, 30. 

Cornish; 21, 30. French Element in Vocabu- 
Cromwell, 125. lary, 90ff, lOlff, 127, 

Cymric, 21, 30. 135ff. 

Cynewulf, 37, 39. Frisian, 28, 29. 

Danish, 24, 25, 30, 39, 98, Gaelic, 22, 30, 34. 

101. Gallic, 21, 30. 

Danish Element in Vocabu- Gender, 70. 

lary, 52. German, 27, 28, 29. 

Danish Invasion, 39, 40. Germanic, 24, 26. 

Declensions, 65ff, 112, 159ff, Gower, 92, 96, 105. 

184fL Gospels (Anglo-Saxon), 41. 

Development of Vocabu- Gothic, 25, 26, 30, 203. 

lary, 44. Gothic Bible, 26, 203. 

Dialects of Old English, Gradation, 63ff, 82, 169ff. 

40ff. Grammar, 65&, lllff, 159ff. 

Dictionaries, 128. Greek, 17, 18. 



INDEX 



251 



Greek Element in Vocabu- 
lary, 51, 107, 119, 131, 133. 

Gregorian Bible, 17. 

Grimm's Law, 59. 

Guilford, Nicholas De, 
215ff. 

Hamitic Family of Lan- 
guages, 11, 30. 

Hebrew, 12, 30. 

Hebrew Element in Voca- 
bulary, 51, 131. 

Hellenic, 17, 30. 

Henry III, 93, 212. 

High German, 26. 

Hungarian, 13, 30. 

Icelandic, 24, 30. 
Indian, 15, 30. 
Indian (American), 139. 
Ind-European Family of 

Languages, 14, 30. 
Inflection, 175. 
Iranian, 16, 30. 
Irish, 22, 30. 
Irregular Verbs, 86ff. 
Italian, 21, 30, 119, 133. 
Italic, 19, 30. 



Julius Caesar, 34. 
Jutes, 32, 34, 35. 

Kentish, 37, 40, 97. 

Latin (Literary), 19, 30, 36, 
39. 

Latin '(Vulgar), 20, 30. 

Latin Element in Vocabu- 
lary, 47ff, lOOff, 118ff, 
126ff, 131/ff. 

Layamon, 95, 99, 210. 

Lettic, 23, 30. 

Lindisfarne Gospels, 38. 

Lithuanian, 23, 30. 

London, 98, 99, 210. 

Lord's Prayer, 203ff. 

Low German, 26, 27, 30. 

Malay, 139. 

Maldon, 38. 

Manx, 22, 30. 

Mercian, 36, 40. 

Mexican, 139. 

Michel, Dan, 215. 

Midland Dialect, 98ff. 

Milton, 125, 132. 

Modern Persian, 17, 30. 

Mutation, 62ff. 



Jerome, 51. 
Joan of Arc, 93. 
John (King), 92. 
Johnson, Samuel, 128. 



Newman, J. H., 10. 
Nicholas De Guilford, 95, 
Norman, 24, 41, 89, 101. 
Norse, 24. 



252 



INDEX 



Northern Dialect, 97. 
Northumbrian, 36, 39, 97, 

202. 
Norwegian, 24, 30. 
Nouns, 65, lllff, 159ff, 184ff. 
Numerals, 77. 

Old English, 32, 38. 
Old Persian, 16, 30. 
Ormulum, 95, 99, 209. 
Owl and Nightingale, 95, 
215ff. 

Pali, 16. 

Passive Voice, 81. 

Persian (Modern), 17, 30, 
139. 

Persian (Old), 16, 30. 

Phenician, 12, 30. 

Piers Ploughman, 96. 

Polish, 23, 30. 

Polynesia, 139. 

Portuguese, 21, 30, 134. 

Prakrit, 16, 30. 

Prepositions, 78. 

Preteritive-Presents,85, 173. 

Printing, 123. 

Proclamation of Henry III, 
212. 

Pronouns, 70, 113ff, 166ff, 
188ff. 

Pronunciation, 141ff. 

Pronunciation of Conson- 
ants, 56ff, 109ff, 151ff. 



Pronunciation of Vowels, 

53ff, 108, 141ff. 
Prussian (Ancient), 23, 30. 

Reduplication, 82ff, 170, 

198. 
Reformation, 121. 
Renaissance, 118, 131ff. 
Richard II, 94. 
Robert of Gloucester, 97. 
Romance Languages, 21. 
Runic Letters, 34. 
Russian, 23, 30, 139. 

Sanscrit, 16, 30. 

Saxon, 28, 30, 32, 34. 

Scandinavian, 24, 41, 101. 

Scotch Dialect, 98. 

Scott, Walter, 135. 

Scottish-Gaelic, 22, 30. 

Semitic Family of Lang- 
uages, 12, 30. 

Septuagint Bible, 18, 51. 

Shakespeare, 103, 119, 124. 

Sidney, Philip, 119. 

Sievers-Cook Grammar, 66. 

Skeat, 63. 

Slavonic, 23, 30. 

Southern Dialect, 97. 

Spanish, 21, 30, 134. 

Spenser, 119. 

Strong Conjugation, 80ff, 
172ff, 195ff. 



INDEX 



253 



Strong-Weak Verbs, 85ff, 

173ff. 
Stuarts (Period of), 124. 
Subjunctive, 81. 
Surrey, 79, 81, 119. 
Swedish, 25, 30. 

Tense, 81. 
Teutonic, 24ff. 
Towneley Mysteries, 98. 
Turkish, 14, 30, 139. 
Tyndale, 201. 

Ulfilas, 26, 203. 
Umbrian-Samnitic, 19, 30. 
Umlaut, 62ff. 

Ural-Altaic Family of Lang- 
uages, 13, 30. 



Verb, 80S, 114ff, 169ff, 

195ff. 
Vocabulary, 43ff, lOOff, 131. 
Vowel Pronunciation, 53ff, 

108ff, 141ff. 
Vulgar Latin, 20. 
Vulgate Bible, 20, 51, 100. 

Weak Conjugation, 80ff, 

84fT, 170ff, 199ff. 
Welsh, 21, 30. 
West Germanic, 24, 26, 30. 
West Gothic, 22, 30. 
West Saxon, 34, 37ff, 202. 
Widsith, 201. 
Wyclif, 92, 96, 99, 100, 107, 

125, 204. 



Vedic, 16, 30. 



Zend, 16, 30. 



